Why Pike Place Market Gave Up Scraping the Gum Wall

There is a stretch of brick wall in Post Alley, under Pike Place Market, covered in chewed gum. It is about eight feet high and fifty-four feet long. Every colour gum comes in is on it, pressed into the mortar and stretched across the bricks.

In my Short the alley is full, and the people in it are facing the walls. Several have a phone held up to them.

I posted it with a question lifted from an old song: does your chewing gum lose its flavour?

The better question is why the wall is there at all.

One piece, one penny

The wall sits beside the box office of the Market Theater. Unexpected Productions, an improv company, began leasing the building in 1991.

Soon after, according to the company, someone waiting in the ticket line for Theatresports stuck a piece of chewed gum to the brick and pressed a penny into it. By the end of 1995 the wall was covered in gum, each piece topped with a coin.

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

Scraped, twice

The market owns the building. The Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority did not want its historic brick covered in other people’s gum, and asked the theatre to remove it.

The gum came back. The market had it scraped again.

It came back again. In 1998, when the wall had filled up a third time, the market stopped fighting it.

That is the whole answer. The wall exists because removing it didn’t work. Once it was left, it was a thing to see. Once it was a thing to see, more people came to add to it.

Second germiest

In 2009 TripAdvisor put the Gum Wall second on a list of the world’s “germiest” tourist attractions. First was the Blarney Stone, which people kiss.

This did not slow anyone down.

Cleaned once

In November 2015 the market steam-cleaned the wall for the first time in twenty years. It took about 130 hours and removed more than 2,350 pounds of gum, down to bare brick.

That was eight years before I filmed this. You can’t tell.

The song

The line in my caption is older than the wall by about seventy years. “Does the Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Over Night?” was written in 1924 by Billy Rose, Marty Bloom and Ernest Breuer, and first recorded by Ernie Hare and Billy Jones.

Lonnie Donegan recorded it in 1958 as “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight)”. It reached number three in Britain in 1959, and number five in the United States in 1961.

The song asks whether gum you set aside is still worth coming back to. In Post Alley, people don’t come back for it. They leave it, and it stays until the next cleaning.