Bubblegum Alley: An Accidental Monument

Sometime in the nineteen fifties, or perhaps the early nineteen sixties, or possibly the late nineteen sixties, someone pressed a piece of chewing gum to the brick wall of a narrow alley behind Higuera Street in downtown San Luis Obispo. The exact date is genuinely disputed. Some historians believe it started as a graduating class tradition at San Luis Obispo High School. Others attribute it to a rivalry between high school and California Polytechnic students. One account places the first piece in the late nineteen sixties. What is agreed upon is that by the nineteen seventies the practice was well underway, and by the time anyone thought to stop it, stopping it was no longer possible.

The city cleaned the alley twice. Both times, the gum returned within months, from what appears to be a deep municipal instinct that some public walls are meant to receive offerings.

The alley is roughly seventy feet long and fifteen feet high. The walls are now covered in decades of accumulated gum, layered in places to several inches of thickness, pressed in patterns and messages and shapes by visitors from around the world. It has no official designation and no interpretive signage. It is, in the vocabulary of public space, completely unplanned: a collective monument produced by sixty or more years of small, individual decisions, none of which was intended to create a monument.

Whether that makes it the most democratic public art installation in San Luis Obispo or a public health situation is a question the city has been failing to settle for decades.