Gum Wall

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The Gum Wall in Seattle (left) in 2017 - meanwhile the opposite house wall is also covered with stickers

A house wall in Seattle in the United States to which thousands of chewing gum were stuck is referred to as a gum wall ( German : "Gummiwand") . The theater- belonging wall at 1428 Post Alley is one of Seattle's most visited tourist attractions .

history

The Gum Wall is located on a covered, stone-paved pedestrian alley at the entrance to the historic Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. This is where the Market Theater is located , which is played by the acting company Unexpected Productions . In the early 1990s, waiting guests at the entrance to the theater began to stick their chewed gum on the wall. Initially, coins were attached to the wall with the rubbers, similar to a wishing well . As early as 1995, the theater wall was covered with chewing gum and coins over a length of 16½ meters and up to 2½ meters high; In that year a large part of the coins was removed, since then only chewing gum, sometimes with small pieces of paper, has been stuck. In the 1990s, the building owner had the wall cleaned repeatedly, but since 1999 it has been classified as an improvised art project and as worthy of preservation by the pike market management. In 2009, the wall served as a film set - Jennifer Aniston and Aaron Eckhart passed it on a walk in the film Love Happens .

In 2015, authorities decided to clean the wall for the first time in 18 years. The reason given was the sugar content and other ingredients of the chewing gum, which damage the substance of the historic brick wall. There was no health risk, as the wall with the chewing gum was regularly disinfected with hot steam. The announcement of the cleaning campaign already led to media reports worldwide; there were protests on site. The Pike Market management called on market visitors to take photos of the wall again before the cleaning campaign and launched a corresponding competition (The Gum Wall Snap!) . The cleaning campaign, which cost around USD 4,000, was carried out over several days in November 2015. Around a million chewing gum was removed from the wall using steam at a temperature of 137 degrees. After 130 hours of work by Cascadian Building Maintenance , the up to 15 centimeters thick bonded brick wall was cleaned, and almost 100 buckets of chewing gum with a total weight of 907 kilograms had been removed. After the wall was sealed, it was immediately pasted again by tourists.

meaning

The Gum Wall is described as an interactive, public art project. It was declared a tourist attraction by the city in 1999 and is now featured in all city guides and on tourism websites. The Wall is one of the most photographed landmarks in Seattle; It's especially popular for selfies , and by November 2015 it had been tagged more than 80,000 times on Instagram .

Crosscut.com described the wall as the "most disgusting sight in Seattle", an assessment that has been confirmed by many media - for example, Axel Springer's Travelbook asked whether the wall was the most disgusting sight in the world. The Sun also headlined : Is this the most disgusting tourist attraction in the world? In 2009, which was Gum Wall in a ranking of TripAdvisor counted among the "world's five unhygienic tourist attractions".

Euronews stated:

"[Also] 30 years after its creation, the Gum Wall is both pleasing and disgusting ."

- Euronews : October 15, 2019

In the city of San Luis Obispo in California there is the lesser-known but older Bubblegum Alley (German: "Chewing Gum Alley"), the side walls of which are also covered with chewing gum over a length of 20 meters.

A gum wall on Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz in Bonn

Gum walls as chewing gum collection boxes

The term gum wall is used in Germany to denote flat metal boxes attached to pillars that are used to stick and collect chewed gum in order to reduce the cost of removing gum that has trodden onto the road surface. According to projections by the inventor's company, the German municipalities would have to raise millions of euros annually for the disposal of chewing gum. Such objects have already been set up in Berlin , Bonn , Frankfurt am Main , Heidelberg and Stuttgart , among others . Flat boxes attached to posts are also used in English cities to collect used chewing gum.

Web links

Commons : Gum Wall  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Craig Sailor: Social media has turned this sticky alley into one of Seattle's top tourist destinations. In: The News Tribune , Washington. March 28, 2018, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b c Carolina Torres: This is the nastiest sight in the world. In: Bento . May 27, 2016, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  3. ^ "Gum Wall" in Seattle: What's Left of the Rubber. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . November 12, 2015, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  4. ^ Moritz Geyer: Disposal of chewing gum: Tough matter. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . August 22, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Ted Fry: What's real and what's not in Seattle-set movie 'Love Happens'. In: Seattle Times . September 17, 2009, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  6. ↑ a b c Danny Lewis: Seattle's Famous 'Gum Wall' Is Getting Scraped Clean. In: Smithsonian Magazine . November 6, 2015, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  7. ↑ Kirk Johnson: Saying Goodbye a Little Longer as Seattle Scrapes Off Its Gum Wall. In: The New York Times . November 11, 2015, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  8. ^ A b Mary Forgione: Chew on this: Seattle's Gum Wall to be blasted clean. In: Los Angeles Times . November 4, 2015, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  9. ↑ a b Sticky situation: Seattle's 'gum wall' delights and disgusts in equal measure. In: euronews . October 15, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Knute Berger: Gum on the wall: How Seattle's strangest tourist attraction reflects the city's identity. In: crosscut.com. November 10, 2015, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Is that the grossest sight in the world? In: Travelbook ( Axel Springer SE ). October 24, 2017, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Julia Corderoy: Chew on that: Is this the most disgusting tourist attraction in the world? Seattle has a 'chewing gum wall' - and it's even on TripAdvisor. In: The Sun . October 3, 2017, accessed on January 8, 2020 (English, original: news.com.au).
  13. ↑ Katie McFadden: Top 5 Germiest Tourist Attractions. In: Travelers Today. September 29, 2013, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  14. ↑ in the original: "Thirty years on from its inception, the Gum Wall continues to delight and disgust in equal measure."
  15. ^ Jan Friedman: Eccentric California (Bradt Travel Guide Eccentric California) . New York 2005, ISBN 978-1-84162-126-5 , p. 102.
  16. ↑ a b Florian Thalmann: No more rubber: stick on instead of spit out , November 28, 2019, Berliner Zeitung
  17. ↑ Stefan Knopp: Gum walls are being tested: In Bonn, chewing gum is now stuck on. In: General-Anzeiger Bonn . August 23, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  18. ↑ Against pavement pollution: Gum Walls in Frankfurt: stick on chewing gum instead of spitting it out. In: hessenschau.de. Hessischer Rundfunk , October 29, 2019, accessed on January 8, 2020 .
  19. ↑ The fight is announced on spit chewing gum. In: Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung . November 5, 2019, accessed January 8, 2020 .
  20. ↑ "Gum Wall": Disgusting or a sensible alternative? In: Baden's latest news . November 16, 2018, accessed January 8, 2020 .

Coordinates: 47 ° 36 ′ 29.9 "  N , 122 ° 20 ′ 25"  W.