Preservationists had a last chance to save the brutalist but broken-down Vaillancourt Fountain with an appeal hearing at the SF Board of Supervisors Tuesday, but the supervisors still approved removing the fountain in a 10-1 vote.
The writing has been on the wall for more than a year and a half that the Embarcadero Plaza’s crumbling and controversial Vaillancourt Fountain might not be around for much longer. The brutalist-designed and some would say ugly fountain has been there since 1971, but was not included on a $30 million redesign of the plaza proposed in July 2024. That brought out the cavalry of Vaillancourt Fountain fans to defend the long-not functioning public art piece, even bringing the original 95-year-old artist Armand Vaillancourt to SF to fight for it.
But the fountain problems came to a head this past June when the SF Rec and Parks Department declared the fountain “hazardous” and fenced it off to the public. Rec and Parks then formally requested the fountain’s removal in August. The fountain’s technical owner, the SF Arts Commission, agreed and voted to have the fountain removed in early November.
Still, the fountain’s supporters had their one last chance appeal to the SF Board of Supervisors at yesterday’s weekly Board of Supervisors meeting. But the supervisors were not exactly gushing over the dilapidated old fountain, and voted 10-1 to reject the appeal and have Vaillancourt Fountain removed.
“I do believe that this fountain, which is a 710-ton concrete structure, poses a significant public safety hazard,” Supervisor Danny Sauter, who represents the fountain’s District 3, said before voting to remove the fountain.
The fountain’s die-hard supporters argued that SF City Hall had neglected the structure for years, and that the fix was in when they ordered the fountain closed off without conducting a proper review under the notorious state environmental review law California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). City Hall shoots back that they used a perfectly legal emergency statutory exemption to shut it down, though fountain supporters did not buy this.
“There’s nothing new that’s happened, it’s not a sudden emergency or unexpected occurrence,” CEQA attorney Susan Brandt-Hawley argued to the supervisors. “It’s just the continued failure of the city to maintain the fountain that’s led to its condition.”
Money is also a huge issue here, and city officials estimate the cost of renovating the fountain at $29 million, while the overall Embarcadero Plaza is working on a $30 million budget.
But the only board member who voted for keeping the fountain, District 9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder, found it very curious that nonprofits making huge behested payments to the city had all argued against keeping the old fountain in the new park, and they seemed to be getting their way.
“There’s a lot of money going into this from outside of the city government, it seems,” Fielder said Tuesday. “It seems like there’s a lot of interest from a lot of powerful people downtown in this particular spot. And I find it very interesting that when that’s the case, Rec and Park can move mountains to get something done.”
But this thing boiled down to safety issues for most supervisors. The fountain has experienced advanced levels of corrosion, pieces are resting on each other in ways they shouldn't be, and the structure is missing some components. Oh, and some people have been sleeping or lodging in the fountain’s empty cavities since the water was shut off.
“Individuals have entered the structure, including sleeping within the concrete tubes,” SF Planning Department Senior Environmental Planner Kei Zushi said before the vote. “If a structural failure were to occur, and of the ten-ton concrete arms were to fall, it could cause serious injury or in the worst case loss of life.”
That’s why most supervisors were in favor of just removing the fountain outright.
“The fact is right now that the fountain is not working and it does present a hazard,” Supervisor Myrna Melgar added. “Even though folks skate on it and do all kinds of things to it, that doesn’t mean it’s safe. It’s actually quite hazardous.”
And so the Vaillancourt Fountain will be removed, probably starting in mid-February, in a task that’s expected to take approximately two months. It will not be destroyed, Rec and Parks will put it into storage, conduct “further technical analysis,” and it could possibly be rebuilt.
But the likelihood of that seems slim.
Image: 9yz via Wikimedia Commons
