Bubblegum Alley: San Luis Obispo's Sticky Landmark
Near Pismo Beach, California
In downtown San Luis Obispo, there is a seventy-foot alley whose brick walls are covered floor to ceiling in used chewing gum. Nobody is quite sure when it started. Some say a high school graduating class began the tradition right after World War Two.
Others trace it to a late nineteen fifties rivalry between Cal Poly students and local high schoolers. What is certain is that by the early nineteen seventies Bubblegum Alley was an established institution. The gum survived two full cleanings in the nineteen seventies.
When the Downtown Business Association tried to organize another cleaning in nineteen ninety-six, it did not succeed, and the gum stayed. The walls now rise fifteen feet high on either side, layered with decades of wads in every color, some pressed into names and dates and small mosaic portraits. It is, by any measure, one of the stranger things you will encounter on this coast.
