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Fremont is my adopted city. I moved to this East Bay city soon after I got married a few years ago. Previous to this I lived, studied and worked in San Francisco. There was a period where I also lived in San Pablo but I practically spent all my waking hours in the City by the Bay.

Before moving to Fremont, I viewed this city 50 miles from Frisco rather disparagingly. It was always that far-away suburban town where nothing happened. It has none of the cultural significance and excitement of San Francisco. Its night life is virtually non-existent. The better malls and theaters are found in neighboring towns. So as you can imagine my move to Fremont was accompanied with some trepidation. But I did it for the wife anyway. She grew up here and wanted to stay close to her family.

It took me awhile to get acclimated to Fremont. My first couple of years living here I still held a job in downtown San Francisco, commuting there everyday by BART. The transition to becoming a full-fledged Fremont man came when I found work locally at the HQ of a wireless retailer. I believe the Lord had gradually taken me away from the city that had been host to the decadent, hedonistic lifestyle of my bachelor days. No longer was I to be exposed to the temptations of a place that took focus away from the things that mattered in life.

That is why the move to Fremont turned out to be a blessing. The City of Fremont is a family-oriented community, and as such, it fits me and my family quite nicely. It actually has a lot going for it. Really. Aside from being in the Silicon Valley where tech jobs can be found, it was named the “best city in America to raise children” and it ranks as one of the top 10 safest cities to live in the U.S. Having started as an agricultural town, Fremont is an odd mixture of residential areas, farm land and high tech business parks. It has become a favorite test bed for technologies such as cable internet service, digital cable and digital phone lines. It has also grown to be one of the most diverse communities in the Bay Area, being home to a large number of Asian immigrants mostly from India and China (many Filipinos live in adjacent Union City).

Here are other interesting facts about Fremont:

• Cyberdyne Systems, the building blown up in T2, is located in Fremont
• Charlie Chaplin shot many of his films, including The Tramp, in the Niles district of Fremont
• Kristi Yamaguchi hails from Fremont
• MC Hammer’s infamous $12 million mansion is located in Fremont (can’t touch this)
• home to the largest Afghan community in the US (dubbed Little Kabul)
• Leland Stanford, former governor of California and resident of Fremont, considered Fremont as a possible site for Stanford University (oh how that would’ve changed Fremont!)
• Dumbarton Bridge, which connects Fremont to the Peninsula, is the first built of the Bay’s seven bridges, pre-dating both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge
• Puck from MTV’s Real World is from Fremont (not a good thing)

I worked next door to Cyberdyne Systems and didn’t even know it. I always knew the building that was blown up in Terminator 2: Judgment Day was somewhere in Fremont, CA but didn’t know exactly where. It turns out that during all the years I worked at ePhones on Bayside Parkway, I was working next to the building that was featured in the movie. I only realized this when I watched T2 once again on DVD recently. I visited the site today and took some pictures.

Here’s the front of the building:

Here’s a still from the movie clearly showing the three-tiered portico of the building:

This is me and one of my sons in front of the old ePhones building (now empty) next door. The ePhones building shares the same form factor as the Cyberdyne Systems building. You’ll see that the door is similar to the one that Ahhnold comes out of.

I’ll blog some other time about another movie star who shot many movies in Fremont. *grin*