The Fremont Troll exists because of a problem no one could solve politely. In 1990, the space beneath the Aurora Bridge was a dumping ground for mattresses, beer cans, and the people who had nowhere else to go. The Fremont Arts Council launched an art competition, reasoning that a piece of art might accomplish what complaints and cleanup crews could not. Four artists won the commission: Steve Badanes, Will Martin, Donna Walter, and Ross Whitehead. They drew on Scandinavian folklore, where trolls live under bridges, and built their creature from steel rebar, wire, and concrete. At 13,000 pounds, it was a permanent occupant. The troll displaced the people who had been sleeping there, a fact the Arts Council considered a feature rather than a flaw. The sculpture was simultaneously a work of public art and an act of exclusion, a tension that has followed it ever since.

Within a year of its installation, the Troll was already being vandalized. Neighbors funded powerful floodlights to deter both graffiti artists and late-night revelers. The beard and hair were frequent targets. Homeless encampments returned to the area around the sculpture, and in January 2019 the city swept camps adjacent to the Troll following repeated drug overdoses. From January to mid-May of that year alone, Seattle received 28 complaints about needles or homelessness within a single block of the sculpture. The Troll endures all of this without changing expression, which may be the most troll-like thing about it. In 2005, the street running downhill from the sculpture to North 34th Street was renamed Troll Avenue, a civic honor that doubled as a wayfinding convenience.

The Fremont Troll has burrowed into popular culture with surprising persistence. It appeared in the 1999 film 10 Things I Hate About You, in a scene between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Larisa Oleynik. The 2015 video game Life is Strange included it in its first episode. The final season of the television series Once Upon a Time featured a fictionalized version, with a replica built in Vancouver for filming. In 2022, the Seattle Kraken hockey team introduced their mascot Buoy as the Troll's nephew. The Seattle Repertory Theatre produced a play called Lydia and the Troll the same year. The artists retain copyright over the Troll's image and have sued businesses that used it commercially without permission, a reminder that even a creature made of rebar and concrete has rights.

The stairway leading to the top of the sculpture was rebuilt in September 2023 using funds from the Move Seattle levy, and volunteers planted additional vegetation around the Troll the following month. These acts of civic care reflect something genuine about the sculpture's role in its neighborhood. Fremont calls itself the Center of the Universe and means it only half-ironically. The Troll is its anchor, a piece of Scandinavian mythology rendered in American concrete, squatting beneath an American bridge, clutching an imported car. It weighs six and a half tons and cannot be moved. In a neighborhood that changes constantly, with tech offices replacing bungalows and rents climbing past what artists can afford, the Troll stays exactly where it is, doing exactly what trolls do.