Vaillancourt Fountain’s water is back, but it’s blue
The Vaillancourt Fountain in San Francisco, eviscerated by The Chronicle’s former architecture critic Allan Temko upon its 1971 installation, spray-painted by U2’s Bono and included on no one’s snow globe or postcard home, has found a new way to get attention.
It has been spewing water the hue of Ty-DBol cleaner.
Chronicle urban design critic John King reported in mid-August that the waters were flowing again in the Embarcadero fountain, almost-certainly-notcoincidentally just one week after Chronicle art critic Charles Desmarais wrote an essay calling for the return of “a healthy Vaillancourt fountain.”
After the blue hue showed up on Twitter, theories for the sudden change in color ranged from “a huge bag of urinal cakes” to Listerine to some sort of crystal-meth-related accident. Blame was pointed at Bono, the singer who touched off a political firestorm and was threatened with arrest when he painted “Stop the Traffic Rock and Roll” on the fountain during a free concert in 1987.
Recreation and Park Department spokeswoman Connie Chan had a much less sensational answer: algae killer.
“Currently, Vaillancourt Fountain’s water has been treated with ‘Blue Lagoon,’ a nontoxic, environmentally friendly biological product with blue hue that controls algae and bacteria from developing in the filtration system by reflecting certain light wave from the water,” she wrote in an email.
No word on how long the blue water will flow, but it showed no signs of abating as workers set up tents near the fountain for the American Heart Association’s San Francisco Heart Walk, set to begin Friday morning. Children and parents pushing strollers walked up to the edge of the fountain on Thursday morning, looking suspiciously at the streams spewing out of the square concrete spigots.
The fountain, designed by Canadian artist Armand Vail- lancourt, was the subject of critical reviews when it was completed. The Chronicle’s Temko wrote that the public art looked like it was “deblue posited by a giant concrete dog with square intestines.”
Earlier this summer, pundits seemed happy there was something coming out of the twisty sculpture at all, after the water had been turned off for several years because of the drought.
Chan confirmed that the water will continue to flow until the Embarcadero ice skating rink opens in November or the department runs into “operational challenges.” Until then, no matter how much the water looks like your favorite flavor of Gatorade, the advice provided by @SFCityGuides still stands:
“As our volunteers will tell you on the Ferry Building tour,” the nonprofit group warned on Twitter, “please don’t drink the water in the fountain.”