It now boasts an estimated 1 million pieces in a kaleidoscope of colours, a few stretched and pinched into messages, hearts and other designs.
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Seattle’s Market Theatre Gum Wall will soon be scraped clean of the thousands of multi-colored pieces of the chewed gum that has been collecting on its surface over the last 20 years.
Seattle isn’t the only town on the west coast with a tradition of coating walls in a smorgasbord of chewing gum: San Luis Obispo, a small college town on California’s central coast also has a bubble gum alley, although there aren’t any public sanitation workers melting gelatinous globs from it today.
“It’s an icon. It’s history”, said onlooker Zoe Freeman, who works near Pike Place. Officials intend to weigh all the gum they gather in order to determine an exact measurement.
The Pike Place Market Preservation & Development Authority announced the “Gum Wall” would be cleaned off on November 10, something that had not happened in two decades.
The post Seattle’s 20-year-old “Gum Wall” gets cleaned appeared first on PBS NewsHour.
Over the years, gum gobs have spread beyond the original wall to encompass a space more than 8 feet high and 54 feet wide, Crawford said.
In Post Alley under the Pike Place Market, there is a 15-foot-high, 50-foot-long wall that backs up the Market Theater’s box office. The cleaning is slated to take three days to complete.
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Market officials hope to contain where people put their gum in the future but say they aren’t holding their breath.
