Washington: Seattle – Giant Red Popsicles

🎨 A Lolly on the Side of a Skyscraper

We came across one of the more recent additions to Martin Selig’s art collection — a sculpture called “The Red Popsicle” by the artist Catherine Mayer. It was acquired back in 2011, which, if you think about it, wasn’t actually that long ago in the grand scheme of public art, though it feels like another era entirely. The piece now sits outside the Fourth and Blanchard Building in Seattle, doing what large public sculptures do best: making people stop, stare, and wonder who on earth approved the budget for that.

🏢 The Building With Three Names (Because One Wasn’t Confusing Enough)

The Fourth and Blanchard Building has, in the way of American corporate real estate, accumulated a small collection of names over the years. It’s also known as the Sedgwick James Building — after the insurance brokerage firm that once occupied it — and, rather more entertainingly, as the Darth Vader Building. That last one, I think we can all agree, is the one that actually stuck. The nickname comes from its dark, brooding, reflective glass façade, which does give it a certain menacing, galaxy-conquering quality if you squint at it on a grey Seattle morning. Which, let’s be honest, is most mornings.

📍 Belltown: Not Quite Downtown, But Don’t Tell It That

The building stands in the Belltown neighbourhood, just north of downtown Seattle proper. Belltown has had quite the journey — it spent much of the 20th century as a rather down-at-heel area of cheap hotels, light industry, and the sort of establishments your mother told you to walk past quickly. By the 1980s and 1990s, it had reinvented itself as something of an arts and music hub, riding the wave of Seattle’s grunge era before the inevitable tide of gentrification rolled in and replaced the record shops with cocktail bars. Today it’s a dense, walkable urban neighbourhood full of restaurants, residential towers, and, apparently, giant red ice lollies on the pavement.

The Fourth and Blanchard Building itself is a proper skyscraper by any sensible measure, rising above the low-rise street level of the surrounding blocks and forming part of Seattle’s recognisable skyline. It’s the sort of building that looks perfectly at home in a city that has never been shy about mixing the dramatic with the everyday.

And right there, outside it all, is Catherine Mayer’s “The Red Popsicle” — cheerful, oversized, and absolutely refusing to take any of it too seriously. Which, frankly, seems about right.