Colorful art won’t come off a Seattle street, so dull paint will cover it

Score one for bleak, coldhearted, efficient pragmatism.

Color, whimsy, time-wasting art: This is not your place.

The street mural on Ninth Avenue in downtown Seattle — painted for an August pedestrian market — that’s proven difficult to remove from the pavement leaving the street closed for weeks after the market’s denouement, will soon be covered up.

The prismatic pavement — decorated with thick white lines and circles of red, yellow, green and blue — will most likely be covered with black or gray paint, the Seattle Department of Transportation said Friday evening.

Ninth Avenue between Pike and Pine, right next to the Paramount Theatre, was painted by the Seattle Convention Center as part of its Market at the Marquee event, featuring music, food and vendors on Thursday nights in August.

But when the event ran its course and workers tried to wash, scrub and blast the paint off the asphalt, they found it wouldn’t come up. And because the painting featured lines that looked vaguely like lane lines, SDOT said the street could not reopen until the regular, plain, dull roadway was restored.

The city actually has a program that allows residents to paint murals on streets and intersections, but only on nonarterial streets. The block of Ninth Avenue that’s been painted is designated as a “minor arterial.”

That block is not one of city’s busiest, but its closure does obstruct an onramp to the Interstate 5 express lanes. Drivers headed west from Capitol Hill have had to circle a couple of blocks around the closed street and loop back up the hill on Pike to access the ramp.

“Near-term, the artwork will be covered up — most likely with paint,” SDOT spokesperson Ethan Bergerson wrote Friday. “Then lane markings can be applied on top so the street is ready for traffic.”

This solution was top of mind for many.

“Paint over it with black and be done,” wrote one commenter on The Seattle Times article about the street snafu.

“Just paint over it,” wrote another.

“Maybe try some black paint,” a third said.

There were dozens of others.

Bergerson said an update on the cover-up painting will be coming soon.

He said the paint is only a short-term fix and that the artwork will likely be ground off and the street surface repaired and restriped.

The Convention Center has tried both graffiti remover and heated pressure washers to get the paint off the street. But the paint, the art, endured. So more paint, but less art, is coming.