Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor on the Pike Place Gum Wall?

There’s a brick wall in Post Alley, under Pike Place Market, that’s covered in chewed gum. It’s about eight feet high and fifty-four feet long, and every color of gum you can think of is on it, pressed into the mortar and stretched across the bricks.

I’m at the market often, and I’ve never seen it clean. If I have time, I walk through Post Alley just to see it. It’s a little weird, but it’s fun to watch people’s reactions. There are countless selfies. And I listen to what people ask each other. One question comes up more than any other: do they clean it?

The light in the alley changes too, and I usually stop to take a few photos.

In my Short the alley is packed. Most people are facing the wall, and a lot of them are holding up a phone.

I set it to an old song and borrowed the song’s question for the caption: does your chewing gum lose its flavor? What I really wanted to know was how a wall like this ends up in the middle of Seattle’s most famous market.

One piece, one penny

The wall is next to the box office of the Market Theater. Unexpected Productions, an improv company, started leasing the building in 1991.

Not long after, according to the company, someone waiting in line for Theatresports stuck a piece of chewed gum on the brick and pressed a penny into it. By the end of 1995 the wall was covered, with a coin in every piece.

Then someone who needed the money took the coins and left the gum. People kept sticking theirs up anyway.

Scraped, twice

The market owns the building, through the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority. It didn’t want gum all over its historic brick, so it asked the theater to take it down.

The gum came back, and the market had it scraped again. By 1998 the wall had filled up a third time, and the market stopped asking.

Would it have come back a fourth time?

It got the chance. In November 2015 the market had the wall steam-cleaned for the first time in twenty years. It took 130 hours, and more than a ton of gum came off. The wall filled back up. It was cleaned again a few years later, and it filled back up again.

So yes, they clean it. It just doesn’t stay clean.

Second germiest

In 2009 TripAdvisor ranked the Gum Wall the second germiest tourist attraction in the world. First place went to the Blarney Stone, which people kiss.

The song

The music on my Short is Lonnie Donegan’s “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight)”. He recorded it in 1958, and it went to number three in Britain in 1959 and number five in the US in 1961.

The song itself is about seventy years older than the wall. It started out in 1924 as “Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Over Night?”, written by Billy Rose, Marty Bloom and Ernest Breuer and first recorded by Ernie Hare and Billy Jones.

In the song, you park your gum on the bedpost so you can come back to it. Nobody in Post Alley is coming back for theirs.