The Wall of Death

The story

If you’re barrelling down the Burke-Gilman Trail beneath the concrete belly of the University Bridge, you’ll likely breeze right past it. But hit the brakes and look up: suspended right beneath the bridge deck sits a surreal 1993 public art installation created by father-and-son sculptors Mowry Baden and Colin Baden. Funded through Seattle City Light’s 1% for Art program, the installation is a structural ghost town—a ring of lavender conical steel posts holding up an elevated pinkish-orange metal track with the words "THE WALL OF DEATH" cut directly into the frame.

The piece is a direct nod to the traveling carnival motordromes of the early 20th century, where stunt drivers throttled motorcycles inside near-vertical wooden silos, held against the wall by centrifugal force. The Badens took that high-octane spectacle and rendered it completely immobile. Across the asphalt path, stylized metal spectator chairs are bolted straight onto the raw concrete bridge pillars, creating a phantom grandstand overhead for an audience watching stunts that will never happen.

Unsurprisingly, when the steel ring went up in the early nineties, local skateboarders treated the curved track as a dare rather than a sculpture, attempting to ride the vertical walls. City officials put a stop to that years ago, declaring the art strictly off-limits to wheels. Today, it remains one of the city's best quiet underpass secrets: an empty, frozen arena built for imaginary daredevils.