San Francisco Wants to Destroy a 96-Year-Old’s Defining Artwork

The Vaillancourt Fountain, a tangled web of concrete tubing that once belched 30,000 gallons of water a minute from a plaza near the San Francisco Bay, has been called many names. Often, it is called ugly.

Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle’s leading columnist of the 20th century, thought the fountain resembled a collapsed structure, calling it a 10 on the Richter scale.

In San Francisco magazine, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Allan Temko nearly ran out of adjectives when he harrumphed that the fountain was “incredibly ugly, brutal, pretentiously simple-minded and literally insipid concrete blocks” that resembled excrement “deposited by a giant concrete dog with square intestines.”

So one might think the city’s proposal to replace the maligned fountain with native landscaping, picnic areas and other amenities would be met with applause. But this is San Francisco, where every action generates a reaction.

Destroying the Vaillancourt Fountain, its supporters say, would be erasing history and modern architecture, and counter to the city’s reputation for being weird. Bono spray-painted “Rock ’n’ Roll Stops the Traffic” on the fountain, which was completed in 1971, during a free U2 concert in 1987; the sculpture’s steps and ledges made it a skateboarding mecca in the 1990s.

“It’s weird and unusual,” said Ted Barrow, a skateboarder and art historian. “It’s a symbol of San Francisco.”

Armand Vaillancourt, 96, said in a video interview from his Montreal studio that his most famous work belongs to the people.

“I think people love it,” he said. “It’s been neglected but it’s still alive.” He called himself a joyous man who continues to create but added, “I’m very badly hurt.” His long white hair gave him the look of a prophet as he warned, “It’s going to be the shame of the city of San Francisco if they demolish it.”

In the fountain’s prime, people wended their way into the 710-ton sculpture whose water drowned out noise from the double-decker freeway that wrapped behind it. Two years after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the damaged freeway was removed, exposing the fountain and stripping some of its meaning.

Today, padel courts are shoved against the fenced-off fountain, which no longer spews water in Embarcadero Plaza. One side of the fountain has become a small gathering place for people with shopping carts who have nowhere else to go.

The fountain, on the northeastern edge of the city at the foot of Market Street, sits near the sparkling Bay where ferry boats carry passengers to Sausalito, Angel Island and beyond. Every Saturday, thousands of shoppers descend on the Ferry Building, drawn to the kaleidoscopic farmers’ market for black Mission figs, lemon verbena, Lion’s mane mushrooms and other Bay Area essentials.

At noon on a beautiful Saturday in late September, there was no one near the fountain, not even the people with no place else to go.

San Francisco has proposed a $35 million renovation of the plaza in a public-private partnership. The city’s Recreation and Park Department asked its Arts Commission in August for permission to deaccession the fountain, calling it “a design constraint.”

Recent city-sponsored reports determined that the fountain’s mechanical and electrical systems have failed, and that it is a seismic risk with hazardous materials and is not in compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. The fountain is technically not beyond repair, the reports said, for the cost of $28,951,519.

“When the water was flowing, I thought it was really cool,” said Kat Anderson, the president of the department’s seven-member commission. “But it was designed to be a fountain and it’s not a fountain anymore.”

In the late 1960s, city officials held a design competition for the fountain that was won by Vaillancourt, a well-known Canadian sculptor. Over his 74-year career, he has crafted pieces from metal, wood and concrete that are in museums and public spaces throughout Quebec. Although his San Francisco fountain is included in “The Atlas of Brutalist Architecture,” he said in the interview, he “didn’t know about Brutalist and all that.”

The fate of the Vaillancourt Fountain raises questions about unpopular public art.

“It’s not a masterpiece, but it captures a moment so distinctly and with such verve,” said John King, a former architecture critic at The Chronicle and the author of “Portal: San Francisco’s Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities.”

“It’s one of urban America’s truly bizarre works of public art” and “a reminder of midcentury mistakes,” he said. Those are precisely the reasons he wants to save the fountain. In the 1960s, architects and city planners believed that grand spaces could be catalysts for people to gather, King said, but often “those spaces turned out to be voids.”

At an Arts Commission meeting this month, speakers were almost evenly divided about the fountain.

“What may appear to some as an odd sculpture speaks directly to anyone who ever felt like they didn’t fit in and why they make San Francisco their home,” said Liz Waytkus, the executive director of Docomomo US, which works to preserve modern architecture.

The next speaker called it “an eyesore.”

Julian Lake, an executive with Bay Area Council, which represents major employers working to improve the Bay Area, said he walked by the fountain every day and thought it had passed its time. “It can be replaced by something equally weird but inspiring,” he said.

In an interview, Charles Birnbaum, the chief executive of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, blamed the city for the plight of the fountain.

“We’re looking at more than a decade of deferred maintenance and also a complete lack of programming,” he said. “People don’t feel welcome.” The message, he said, is that the city does not care.

“It wasn’t neglect,” said Tamara Aparton, a spokeswoman for the Recreation and Park Department. “It was an aging, unsafe system that simply couldn’t be maintained anymore.”

Vaillancourt learned about the threat to his fountain from his children in April after they read the news on their phones. “We were shocked the city never tried to reach my father,” said his 33-year-old son, Alexis Vaillancourt, who is also a sculptor.

In May, the Vaillancourts traveled to meet with city officials, accompanied by representatives from Quebec and the Canadian embassy.

“They were polite,” Alexis Vaillancourt said. “Our feeling was that they wanted to demolish the sculpture.”

Public fountains are sometimes dismantled or relocated when “people with power think that they’re ugly or offensive,” said Michele Bogart, an emeritus professor of art history at Stony Brook University and an expert on public art.

In August, a lawyer for Armand Vaillancourt sent San Francisco a cease-and-desist letter, warning that any effort to destroy the fountain would violate Vaillancourt’s “moral rights.” But once an artwork becomes part of a city collection, Bogart said, the artist has little to no control over the work.

While the city’s Arts Commission prepares to vote on the future of the fountain, Vaillancourt is still designing, at work now on his diamond-shaped black granite tombstone.

The fountain should outlast him, he thinks. “She’s very young,” the artist said. “It should be good for a few hundred years.”