Prior to its cleaning, some areas of the wall had amassed layers of gum several inches thick.
Look closely and you can see handwritten notes and messages spelled out in stretched gum.
A 3d photography tour
Public Art of Seattle
The streets of Seattle are home to many unique art installations and oddities. We've photographed several of our favorite examples to give you a closer look and examine their history. What follows is an interactive tour of these landmarks reconstructed using photogrammetry. They're presented here in 3D with dynamically-projected photographic textures.
The Gum Wall
1428 Post Alley
The Gum Wall is a stretch of alleyway plastered with thousands of chewed gum wads and posters. It's located under Pike Place Market in Downtown Seattle and is a popular place for tourists looking for a gross and unique experience.
In late 2015, the wall underwent its first and only deep cleaning to prevent sugar from eroding the bricks beneath. Workers spent 130 hours steaming some 20 years of cumulus from the wall, filling 94 gallon buckets with approximately 2,350 pounds of gum and other leavings. Pictured here is roughly 7 years of buildup.
Its single metal eye is made from a VW hubcap.
The car originally contained a time capsule with a bust of Elvis that was unfortunately stolen in 1991.
Fremont Troll
N 36th St. at Troll Ave. N
The Fremont Troll is an 18-foot tall sculpture that lurks under the North end of the Aurora Avenue Bridge. It was commissioned as part of a 1989 arts competition to revitalize the area under the bridge, which at the time was uncared for and riddled with trash.
The troll is seen crushing a Volkswagen Beetle with a (now stolen) California license plate, a protest against outsider development in the city. The statue is constructed of more than two tons of rebar, wire, and ferro-cement. Its shape has evolved over the years as new layers of cement are added periodically to cover up vandalism.
One of the first buildings in Seattle to feature colored terracotta.
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Arctic Building Walrus Façade
700 3rd Ave.
The Arctic Building is an ornate Beaux-Arts style building designed by Augustus Warren Gould in Downtown Seattle. It originally housed The Arctic Club, a social club started in 1907 by two tycoons who struck it rich through the Klondike Gold Rush.
It's best known for its prominent terracotta walrus-head cartouches pictured here. The heads have a long history of decay and repair over the years. A failed 1982 restoration replaced the terracotta tusks with plastic, but this made the heads vulnerable to water damage. The switch was reversed in 1996, during which time nine of the twenty-seven heads had to be sawed off and replaced completely.
Art from @12birds and @starheadboy on instagram.
Post Alley Poster Wall
1499 Post Alley
This section of the Post Alley lies about 100 feet North of The Gum Wall section featured above. It is an ever-changing collage of wheatpasted posters, stickers, and graffiti by local street artists. It is one of the largest public art spaces in Seattle.
Much of the guerrilla art is posted without attribution but new additions are often documented online by accounts like @postalley on instagram.