Seattle’s Gum Wall – And Why I Hate It
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I have been to Seattle many times, but for some reason or another, I had never visited the Gum Wall.
If you have never heard of Seattle’s Gum Wall, let me fill you in. It is an alley with gum covered walls. That’s the general overview.
How to get there: The easiest and most efficient way is to GPS the gum wall. If you want to do it the not easy and efficient way, the wall is located in Post Alley at the very South end of Pike Place Market. It’s actually the wall of the Market Theater. If you’re already exploring Pike Place Market, it’s an easy addition to your sight seeing (You can check out my post for things to do in Seattle here).
What to expect: Gum. Lots of gum.
Before I get into my utter disgust of this wall, let’s go into a little bit of the gum wall’s backstory! Y’all know I love a good backstory. So the tradition of leaving gum on the walls of Post Alley began in the early 1990s when attendees of the theater stuck gum on the wall while they were waiting in the box office line. They also apparently stuck coins in the gum, but I don’t really understand why they would do that.
The theater workers tried scraping the gum off the walls, but they couldn’t keep up. Eventually, they gave up. I don’t blame them. The city named the gum wall a tourist attraction in 1999. If you can’t beat em, join em.
Gum covers the entire alley in every nook and cranny. The wall grew, and in some spots, the gum was 15 inches thick.
Seattle’s Gum Wall is the second germiest tourist attraction in the entire world, second only to the Blarney Stone in Ireland ( You know, the one everyone makes out with?). It absolutely skeeved me out. I had been to a gum wall before, in San Luis Obisbo, California, and I took one step inside that alley and I wanted to puke. So naturally, I decided to finally visit the one in Seattle. It was more or less the same, but ten times bigger. Apparently, Seattle’s gum wall is crazy popular for wedding shoots.
Why? I will never know.
I didn’t get any good pictures because I couldn’t stand still. The gum was everywhere and my hair was like a magnet inviting all of it to latch on. The gum even covered the electrical boxes on the outside of the buildings. People have to access those, man! Can you imagine being the unfortunate worker that has to maintain these buildings? Bleh.
Apparently, the city was pretty grossed out as well. After more than twenty years of gum sticking, the city decided to clean the wall for the first time in 2015. The Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority stated it was to prevent further erosion on the bricks. It took the cleaning crew 130 hours of power cleaning to scrape off over two thousand pounds of gum. If you want to see a time lapse of the cleaning, check it out here.
But then, of course, the visitors immediately began to re-gum the wall right after. Some of the first additions were actually memorials to the deadly Paris attacks. So all of my pictures in this posts are AFTER the cleaning. This is just a year and a half of gum. Try to imagine this, but multiplied by twenty years. Well, you could imagine, or you could just google it. It’s insane.
The alley is crazy long too, but I didn’t have the stomach to walk more than a few feet inside. Weirdly enough, people also put their business cards onto the wall. I also don’t understand this. Why would someone look close enough to read a business card?
I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact more than a ton of gum is sitting somewhere in a landfill. Or does it go to compost? What happens to gum when it’s thrown away? Is it biodegradable? After cigarette butts, chewing gum is second most common form of litter. So many questions, so much more gum.
Have you ever been to a gum wall? What do you think of them? And what would you do if people started a gum wall on the exterior of your business?
