Crews are cleaning up the city’s famed “gum wall” near Pike Place Market, where tourists and locals have been sticking their used chewing gum for the past 20 years.
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A worker in a plastic protective suit and mask used a steam cleaner to melt away part of the multi-ton kaleidoscope of chewed and stretched gum chunks, a few used as anchors for photos, business cards, notes and artwork stuck to the wall.
“It´s an icon. It´s history”.
Crawford estimates that there are about 2,200 pounds of gum on the walls, according to an Associated Press video.
It’s true that the Gum Wall is being cleaned of two-decades worth of gum, but that’s not to say it couldn’t rise again. Kelly Foster of Cascadian Building Maintenance, which is handling the clean-up, told the Seattle Times that “this is the weirdest job we have ever done”. They chose steam over pressure-washing to conserve the historic market’s brick walls.
The gum wall began organically in 1991 when nearby theatre patrons began sticking gum onto the alley’s walls, KUOW News reports.
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 whole operation is expected to take three days.
Contractors have been asked to save the piles of gum so that they can be weighed in order to calculate how much of it has been collected over the years.
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“It’s a Seattle tradition and a crowd-sourced piece of public art that people really enjoy”, said Emily Crawford, a spokeswoman for the Pike Place Market Preservation Development Authority.
