Washington: Seattle – The Gum Wall

🍬 Seattle’s Gum Wall — Possibly the Grossest Thing We’ve Ever Queued Up to See

We’ve visited a fair few odd corners of the world over the years, but I can say with some confidence that the Gum Wall in Seattle ranks among the most peculiar — and, frankly, the most revolting — attractions we have ever willingly paid attention to. And we visited it on purpose, which tells you something about the state of us.

📍 Where on Earth Is It?

The Gum Wall lurks in Post Alley, a narrow, cobbled little passage that runs beneath Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. Pike Place, for those who haven’t been, is the famous waterfront market that’s been operating since 1907, and is best known for its fishmongers who throw salmon around like rugby balls while tourists stand there photographing it all. It’s a brilliant place. Post Alley, tucked just below it, is the sort of dimly lit urban corridor you might ordinarily walk through rather quickly. Not anymore.

🕰️ How Did It All Start?

The tradition began, as so many great traditions do, through sheer boredom. Back in the early 1990s, the theatre company Unexpected Productions — which has been running improvised comedy and theatre in Seattle since 1983 — operated out of a space in Post Alley. People queuing for shows had nothing to do while they waited, as was common before smartphones were invented and we all lost the ability to simply stand there doing nothing. So they did what any reasonable person would do: they stuck their chewing gum on the wall. Some of them, in a slightly more ceremonial gesture, pressed a coin into the gum as well. Nobody is entirely sure why. It just seemed like the thing to do.

The staff at Unexpected Productions, to their credit, initially tried to deal with this. They cleaned the walls. They probably put up signs. They may well have despaired quietly. But the queues kept coming, the gum kept arriving, and eventually — as with so many battles against human nature — they gave up. Sensible, really.

🧱 The Wall Itself

The wall now stretches for roughly 50 feet along Post Alley, and it is absolutely covered — floor to ceiling, every square inch — in layer upon layer of chewed gum in every colour imaginable. It looks, if you’re feeling charitable, like a very strange mosaic. If you’re not feeling charitable, it looks like something that’s gone badly wrong.

What we weren’t quite expecting was the art. Some visitors, presumably people with more imagination and more spare gum than the rest of us, have taken to sculpting small figures and shapes directly on the wall. Little gum people. Gum flowers. Gum messages spelled out in multicoloured blobs. It’s the kind of outsider art installation that would probably cost forty quid to see in a gallery in Shoreditch, and here it is, free, in a damp alley in the Pacific Northwest.

🧹 The Great Clean-Up of 2015

In November 2015, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority decided enough was enough and authorised a proper clean. A team of workers armed with steam equipment and scrapers spent 130 hours removing the accumulated gum from the walls. When it was all done, they had scraped away an astonishing 2,350 pounds of the stuff — that’s roughly 1,066 kilograms for those of us who never fully converted to metric. For context, that’s about the weight of a small car.

The walls were left gleaming. Bare brick, clean stone, fresh air. It lasted approximately five minutes. By the following day people were already pressing new gum onto the freshly cleaned surface, and within a few weeks it was well on its way back to its former glory. Today you would walk past and have absolutely no idea any cleaning had ever taken place. I’m not sure whether that’s depressing or impressive. Probably both.

🦠 The Hygiene Situation

Let’s be honest about this. It is not hygienic. Not even slightly. On a warm summer day in Seattle — and they do have them, occasionally — the wall gives off a smell that is difficult to describe politely. It is the concentrated aroma of several decades of other people’s used chewing gum, baking gently in the afternoon sun. You’ll know it when you smell it.

In 2013, a study ranked tourist attractions by the number of germs per square inch, and the Gum Wall came in at number two on the list of the world’s germiest attractions. The only thing dirtier, apparently, was the Blarney Stone in County Cork, Ireland — which is the stone that thousands of tourists lower themselves backwards over a parapet to kiss, which perhaps tells us something about the Irish sense of humour. The Gum Wall, at least, doesn’t require any physical contact.

🗺️ Should You Bother?

Yes, honestly, we think you should — or at least, if you’re already at Pike Place Market, you’d be daft not to nip down and have a look. It takes ten minutes, it costs nothing, and it is genuinely unlike anything else you will see on your travels. It’s weird, it’s a bit ghastly, it smells questionable, and it has absolutely no redeeming cultural or historical significance whatsoever.

Which, in its own way, makes it rather brilliant.