You smell it before you see it. Long before your boots find the damp cobblestones of Post Alley beneath the brick arches of Seattle's Public Market, the air changes. It thickens. It smells faintly of wintergreen, stale spearmint, and the sweet, cloying decay of twenty years of public saliva.
Down here, just a heartbeat away from the salt spray of Elliott Bay, moisture clings to everything. It drips from the rusted iron pipes overhead. It pools in the cracks of the asphalt. And, most famously, it coats the brickwork in a swollen, multicolored pelt that breathes and shifts with the weather. If you enjoyed this piece, you should read: this related article.
For two decades, the Market Theater Gum Wall grew in the dark. It started modestly in 1993. Patrons of the nearby Annex Theatre, waiting in line for tickets or intermission, pressed their chewed-up wads into the masonry. At first, it was a practical joke. A nuisance. A quick place to park a piece of Bazooka or Trident before the house lights dimmed. But human beings possess an irresistible urge to leave a mark. We see a blank space, or in this case, a sticky surface, and we cannot help ourselves. We want the world to know we were here. We were flesh. We were warm. We existed.
By 2015, that casual habit had metastasized into a two-hundred-foot-long monument of confectionery archaeology. For another angle on this development, check out the recent update from The Spruce.
To stand before it was to witness a grotesque kind of folk art. Stalactites of pink, purple, and yellow bubblegum hung heavy from every protruding ledge, stretching downward like melted candles. In some places, the accumulation was four inches deep. Entire marriage proposals had been spelled out in faded Chiclets. Phone numbers, initials, political slogans, and crude drawings were pressed into the mass, frozen in a polymer purgatory of corn syrup, artificial flavoring, and human DNA.
It was disgusting. It was magnificent. It was entirely unsustainable.
Consider the physics of the wall. Every single day, thousands of tourists slid their hands along the brickwork for photographs, leaving behind streaks of gray residue. Street buskers played their guitars against a backdrop of fermenting sugar. Rats scurried through the lower crevices, drawn by the residual corn syrup, fat and bold in the damp Seattle gloom. The structure itself, a historic brick landmark built shortly after the great fire of 1889, was beginning to choke. The porous clay was never meant to bear the weight of two thousand pounds of synthetic rubber. The mastic was trapping moisture against the brick, causing the mortar to crumble and the historic facade to rot from the outside in.
The city reached a breaking point in November 2015.
The cleanup was not scheduled lightly. It required an army of municipal workers, industrial steam-blasters, and a staggering amount of hot water. Imagine standing in the freezing Pacific Northwest chill with a pressurized hose spitting two-hundred-degree water at ninety pounds per square inch. Imagine the smell that rose into the autumn air as twenty years of compressed confection yielded to the heat. It must have smelled like a high school gymnasium floor melted down in a candy factory fire.
As the industrial sprayers went to work, the true scale of the accumulation revealed itself. Bucket by heavy bucket, the historic sludge was scraped off the brick. When the final tally was weighed at the curb, the scale registered a staggering 2,350 pounds.
More than a ton of gum.
Two thousand three hundred and fifty pounds of chewed-up memories, discarded nervous habits, roadside impulses, and roadside poetry, washed down the storm drains of Pike Place. The wall looked naked. Red brick, scarred and pitted, emerged into the pale Seattle daylight for the first time in a generation. It looked raw. It looked vulnerable.
For about five minutes.
Human nature abhors a vacuum, especially an empty sticky surface. Barely had the steam-blasters packed their hoses and loaded their trucks when the first rebellious hand reached out of the crowd. A fresh neon pink square of Bubblicious pressed firmly against the clean brick. Then another. Within hours, the green shoots of a brand-new ecosystem of spit and sugar had taken root. The city had spent days scrubbing away history, only to realize that the wall was never really about the gum.
The gum was just the medium. The wall was a living diary of the transient crowd.
Every traveler who presses a wad into that alleyway is engaging in a quiet, anonymous rebellion against forgetting. We travel because we want to be transformed, but we leave tokens behind because we are terrified of disappearing. We want the city to remember the exact temperature of our skin on a rainy Tuesday in November. We want our brief, insignificant existence to adhere to something older and stronger than we are, even if that something is just a damp brick wall in a subterranean alley.
Today, the wall is back. It is thicker, smellier, and more vibrant than ever. The steam-blasters won a battle, but they lost the war against our desperate need to touch the world and leave a trace. When you walk down Post Alley now, and your sleeve accidentally brushes against a still-soft lump of strawberry-flavored vinyl, do not curse the mess.
Reach into your pocket. Find the foil wrapper. Add your own heartbeat to the pile.
