Some landmarks are built with steel, stone or glass. Seattle has one made largely of something far less permanent: chewing gum. Tucked beneath the famous Pike Place Market, the Seattle Gum Wall has spent decades attracting curious visitors who come to stare, take photographs and, in many cases, add their own sticky contribution. What began as an impromptu habit among people waiting for a theater show eventually grew into one of the city’s strangest attractions. And despite a massive cleanup that stripped thousands of pounds of gum from the walls in 2015, the tradition did not disappear for long.
Where to find Seattle’s Gum Wall
The Gum Wall sits along Post Alley, a pedestrian passage running beneath Pike Place Market and connecting the market area with the streets farther south toward Seattle’s waterfront and ferry terminals. Finding it from Pike Place Market is relatively easy. Look for the section where Pike Street bends and passes beneath the market. Post Alley is nearby, and once you turn into it, the brightly colored walls covered in layers of dried chewing gum are difficult to miss. The gum-covered stretch extends for more than 50 feet, with some sections rising well above eye level. Over the years, visitors have transformed the wall into a patchwork of colorful blobs, shapes, initials and small pieces of street art.The unusual attraction is also surrounded by some of Seattle’s better-known restaurants, bars and entertainment venues, making it easy to include in a walk through Pike Place Market.
It started with theatergoers
The Gum Wall was never supposed to become a tourist attraction. Its story goes back to the early 1990s, when people gathered in Post Alley while waiting to enter the Market Theater, home to Unexpected Productions. Instead of throwing their chewing gum away, some patrons began pressing it onto the nearby wall. At first, it was little more than an odd habit. Theater employees reportedly tried to remove the gum, but the task became increasingly difficult as more visitors joined in.Eventually, the wall accumulated enough gum that cleaning it became an exercise in futility. What started with a few pieces gradually spread across the bricks. By the 2000s, the phenomenon had become impossible to ignore. The gum-covered area had grown to roughly 50 feet wide and 15 feet high, attracting media attention and curious visitors from outside Seattle. The wall had effectively become a landmark without anyone ever planning for it to be one.
A mountain of gum
By 2015, estimates suggested that around one million pieces of chewing gum had found their way onto the wall. The buildup was not simply an eyesore. The sugar and other components in chewing gum were beginning to raise concerns about the condition of the historic brickwork. With the Gum Wall located within the Pike Place Market area, maintaining the structure became a bigger priority. That year, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority finally decided to remove the accumulated gum. The scale of the cleanup was remarkable. Workers began the job on November 10, 2015, using high-temperature water reaching about 280 degrees Fahrenheit to soften and strip away the layers of gum and the operation took approximately 130 hours. When the work was finished, workers had collected 94 buckets of gum weighing around 2,350 pounds. The amount removed was substantial, although estimates of the total buildup before the cleanup had been considerably higher.
The wall came back
It did not stay clean for long. Within days, people were already returning to the alley and sticking fresh gum onto the freshly cleaned bricks. On November 15, a flash mob even gathered at the site and created a peace symbol out of gum following the terrorist attacks in Paris. The display was later removed, but the larger tradition proved much harder to erase. Visitors continued adding gum, rebuilding the bizarre attraction piece by piece. The very act that had created the wall in the first place simply started over.
Seattle’s stickiest tradition
Today, the Gum Wall remains one of Seattle’s most unusual sights. Its colors, textures and sheer quantity of gum make it difficult to mistake for anything else, while its location beneath Pike Place Market puts it directly in the path of thousands of visitors. The wall is also a reminder that some of the most memorable urban landmarks are not designed by architects or city planners. They emerge from ordinary habits that gradually become traditions.Images Courtesy: istock