The artist behind one of San Francisco’s most polarizing landmarks — the Vaillancourt Fountain, a Brutalist jumble of concrete pipes in Embarcadero Plaza — is ready to wage a legal battle to keep it standing.
In a cease-and-desist letter, a lawyer for 96-year-old Quebecois sculptor Armand Vaillancourt tells the city to refrain from “taking any steps whatsoever that may endanger or damage” the structure. The missive, sent last week, says Vaillancourt has teamed up with at least six organizations dedicated to preserving the city’s architectural and cultural identity, and failure to comply with their demand will result in legal action.
The admonishment came days after the city put into writing its plans to tear down the 54-year-old fountain, which has been fenced off and without running water for months.
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For more than a year, the city has implied its intent to dismantle the monument to San Francisco’s modernist history; conspicuously absent from early designs for the plaza’s redevelopment were renderings of the 710-ton sculpture. But toward the end of last month, Recreation and Parks Department chief Phil Ginsburg, the highest-ranking official to weigh in, formally asked to remove it, citing safety risks and prohibitive maintenance costs.
“What was once a statement piece of urban renewal now severely limits our ability to create a safe, functional, and future-ready civic space,” Ginsburg’s Aug. 18 letter states. “The design cannot meet community needs or project goals while retaining the fountain in place.”
Ginsburg goes on to write, “We respectfully request the Arts Commission’s consideration and approval to proceed with the formal deaccession of the Vaillancourt Fountain from the Civic Art Collection and its removal from Embarcadero Plaza. This step is necessary to ensure public safety, uphold responsible stewardship of civic assets, and realize a reimagined Embarcadero Plaza that serves all San Franciscans.”
Ginsburg says it would cost $29 million to get the fountain working again. That’s $3.5 million shy of the total budget for the project to combine what was once known as Justin Herman Plaza with Sue Bierman Park to create a 5-acre recreation area across from the Ferry Building.
The motor that drove water through the precast concrete fountain petered out more than a year ago. Repairing the pump alone would cost about $3 million, the city says. Removing the fountain, on the other hand, would cost an estimated $2.5 million.
Jen Kwart, spokesperson for City Attorney David Chiu, echoed Ginsburg’s concerns about safety and cost.
“City departments are still in the process of reviewing potential next steps with respect to the fountain,” she wrote in an email to The Standard. “Among other things, restoring the Vaillancourt Fountain would require significant repair and rehabilitation to make it safe and functional again. It’s a structurally unsound, hazardous structure with no viable path forward short of a multimillion-dollar renovation. That’s before considering its long-term maintenance and seismic vulnerability. No decision has been made yet, but the city will follow all applicable laws should departments choose to remove the fountain.”
What the city calls a “design constraint,” preservationists regard as a cultural touchstone.
The fountain’s historical significance transcends commentary on modernism. The kinky sculpture and the plaza it occupies are hallowed ground in the city’s world-renowned skateboarding scene. The sculpture has made hundreds of cameos in skate videos since the 1980s — a backdrop for luminaries including Mark Gonzales, Mike Carroll, Lavar McBride, and Henry Sanchez, for whom Embarcadero Plaza was a brick-covered canvas to push the bounds of the burgeoning street scene.
Vaillancourt’s fountain received another layer of immortality last year on the cover of Thrasher Magazine, with skater Ducky Kovac rolling off the structure and into the questionable water below.
In an op-ed last August, skater and art historian Ted Barrow called on civic leaders to preserve Embarcadero Plaza, writing that doing so would “recognize that living in a city means learning to adapt to and find joy in what you cannot change.”
Alexis Vaillancourt, the sculptor’s son and an artist in his own right, questions the city’s numbers and hopes a lawsuit would corroborate accurate estimates. If the cost does turn out to be exorbitant, he said, he hopes the public can learn more about how the city allowed the sculpture to fall into disrepair — and whether, or to what extent, BXP, a real estate developer that owns a nearby office complex, shirked its agreement to help keep it in working order.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which is advocating for the fountain’s preservation, raised similar points about BXP. In a column penned last month, the foundation noted that the company offered to raise $10 million for a new park and wondered if it “created through inadequate maintenance the very problem they seek to ‘solve’ through the demolition of the fountain, a solution the majority costs of which the public would bear?”
BXP didn’t respond to a request for comment; neither did the Recreation and Parks Department, which owns the sculpture. The Arts Commission, which has the power to decide its fate, referred questions to the city attorney.
The younger Vaillancourt says the issue transcends short-term redevelopment timelines and cost estimates.
“You know, the city’s talking about two scenarios: keeping or demolishing it,” he said. “But the renovation doesn’t have to be in one year. Maybe they can secure the structural integrity first, then maybe the water pipes later. Their plans seem predicated on the notion that this needs to be fixed immediately. But this is about something bigger.”
It’s about protecting a piece of history, he said.
“It’s not a matter of whether it’s beautiful or ugly — if people think it’s ugly, then they have to talk about what is beauty in the first place — and it’s not about how much it costs right now,” he said. “It’s about the public interest, and preserving a mark of a time and a movement that might not be totally understood today.”
The Eiffel Tower sparked backlash when it first went up, he noted, and a Diego Rivera mural was chiseled off a wall in New York City over objections to its depiction of Vladimir Lenin. “I’m not saying that this fountain is the same kind of work, or as good of a work, as the Eiffel Tower,” he said, “but there are similarities in the debate around it.”