One of my good girlfriends recently relocated to Seattle and it inspired me to look through my photos from when I visited the city for a weekend back in 2011. (SO long ago!) I’d be lying if I didn’t also mention that seeing photos from Seattle from a handful of YouTuber’s on Instagram didn’t make me also think about the city. AND to top it all off, I recently watched Anthony Bourdain’s (RIP) episode of Part’s Unknown in which he visits Seattle. Long story short: Multiple things in my life were calling for me to browse my Seattle album on Facebook.
What did I see? So many cool things, and lots of cool things that I’d forgotten completely – like the Market Theater Gum Wall in downtown Seattle.
In an alleyway near Pike Place Market back in 1993 when patrons of the Unexpected Theatre’s productions began sticking their chewed gum with coins buried inside. I’m not sure why they placed coins inside, but the theatre employees eventually gave up scraping the gum off the wall and the site was deemed a tourist attraction finally in 1999.
Back in 2015, the city of Seattle gave the wall a complete scrub down to prevent further degradation of the bricks that the building’s are built with. The cleaning took about 130 hours and gum began being place again shortly beginning with memorials to the attacks of the Paris terrorist attacks.
Is it kind of gross? Yeah, definitely. But it’s still kind of cool regardless. I will definitely revisit the next time I’m in Seattle.
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