If you’ve been meaning to visit Seattle’s famous Gum Wall but get grossed out easily, your time has come. The Gum Wall was just cleaned for the first time in five years! The pressure washing started on Monday, November 4 and ended five days later on Friday. At that point, only a heart made of gum remained—a symbolic gesture—but the wall won’t be gum-free for long.
Love it or hate it, you have to admit that the Gum Wall is an important part of Seattle. Pike Place Market calls the Gum Wall a “representation of Seattle’s unique charm and character.” A few other gum walls have popped up around the world but none have reached the same level of infamy. Over the decades it grew from one section of the Post Alley wall in Pike Place Market to covering both alley walls. Nowadays it’s around eight feet high and 54 feet wide.
For the first 20 years of the Gum Wall’s existence, it was only cleaned once. Removing 20 years’ worth of gum and debris was such a Herculean task that from then on, the Gum Wall has been cleaned every four to five years. Rather than schedule an annual cleaning, the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority removes the gum whenever it starts to get too built up.
Here’s a brief history of the Gum Wall, including the (very few) other times it has been cleaned in the past:
- Early 1990s: Unexpected Productions began performing in the theater and audiences waiting in Post Alley began to stick their used gum on the wall.
- 1998: Pike Place Market officials gave up trying to clean the wall and the Gum Wall became a tourist attraction.
- 2015: The Gum Wall was cleaned for the first time in 20 years. It took 130 hours and one ton of gum was removed!
- 2019: The second time the Gum Wall was cleaned since the ’90s.
- November 2024: The third and most recent cleaning of the Gum Wall.
Estimates say there are typically between 50 and 180 pieces of gum per brick. Now that the Gum Wall has been stripped bare, we’ll see how long it takes to get back to that number. According to the Market PDA, it usually only takes one week for there to be “a full layer again.” So make sure to hurry over to the Gum Wall and leave your mark ASAP!