Testing the waters for fountain’s revival
Vaillancourt Fountain came back to life this week, and it was not a pretty sight.
But the watery show on the Embarcadero was a treat nonetheless — one that demonstrates why this long-scorned public art deserves to be restored and enhanced.
The water was rusty brown and unpleasantly aromatic, since it had sat stagnant in piping for several years. Some of the contorted concrete forms were in full gush mode, while others only trickled. The concrete rim around the pool was marred by thick mounds of pigeon droppings.
None of that mattered Tuesday morning to the onlookers drawn by the liquified action and sound of falling water. They posed for pictures, took in the scene. A few even ventured onto the steps along the wall at the back of the fountain, into the spray and mist.
What visitors had stumbled upon, officially, is a test of the plumbing system turned off by the city’s Recreation and Park Department in 2014 because of the drought. A test that is taking place, for the record, one week after Chronicle art critic Charles Desmarais called for the return of “a healthy Vaillancourt Fountain.”
Phil Ginsburg, the department’s general manager, on Tuesday said the test is open-ended — assuming the pipes don’t burst it will stay on until the installation of the annual holiday ice skating rink in November. As for his opinion of the fountain, it’s as noncommittal as can be.
“That’s a tough one,” he said “There are people who love the sculpture and people who don’t like it.”
Place me in the former category, now more than ever. The deliberately provocative fountain has improved with age.
The big change is the absence of the Embarcadero Freeway, the elevated concrete path that from 1959 to 1991 severed Market Street and downtown
Vaillancourt gets a trial run as the city considers future of neglected landmark
San Francisco from the waterfront. The ramps into the Financial District curled behind Justin Herman Plaza, where the fountain by Armand Vaillancourt stands at the northern edge of the terraced brick space.
The fountain debuted in 1971, four years after the first Chronicle story describing the design commented, “You could mistake it for a fanciful junkyard.” A more eloquent written protest came in 1989 from Ruth Asawa.
“In the attempt to provide a disguise and diversion from the freeway, the goal of the fountain as a work of art was lost,” wrote Asawa, the revered San Francisco artist who died in 2013 and whose reputation now far outshines Vaillancourt’s. “With its loss, we have sacrificed the great opportunity of creating a grand termination for Market Street.”
But the removal of the freeway proved Asawa wrong.
We do have a grand termination: the Ferry Building, more potent and than any work of commissioned art could ever be. Vaillancourt Fountain stands to the side, its tumbling streams hinting of the bay that lies beyond A. Page Brown’s 600-foot-wide landmark.
At the same time, Vaillancourt’s assertive abstraction offers a 40-foot-tall clue to a landscape that many Bay Area residents never knew, one where the Ferry Building was stranded and the Embarcadero a string of freeway-shaded parking lots. Open land on the inland side needed a strong lure to attract visitors — so why not a fountain that they could explore?
“It was intended as a total environment, a space animated by people as well as water,” said Charles Birnbaum, president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. He’s also an expert on Lawrence Halprin, the celebrated Bay Area landscape architect who conceived Justin Herman Plaza.
While Vaillancourt was the artist, the fountain’s comehither aspirations were in sync with other Halprin projects of the era.
“Halprin always wanted people to interact with his water features,” said Birnbaum, whose foundation organized an exhibition on the designer now on display at the Palace of Fine Arts. “His goal was to create places that encourage participation.”
The fact that an artist or designer has grand visions doesn’t meant that his or her work deserves to be preserved forevermore. Halprin, who died in 2009, created a much more enduring landscape at Levi’s Plaza, seven blocks to the north. Justin Herman Plaza is scaled for protests or rallies but not casual use, which is why the only people there during much of the day often have their shopping carts nearby.
Vaillancourt Fountain, though, offers an enjoyable reason to linger. You can splash in the water, or ponder how our visions of the role of urban waterfronts have evolved during the past 50 years.
And if it’s crude — well, crude can be compelling. Especially since the fountain now is an artifact — not a warning of what is to come, but a reminder of midcentury mistakes.
Rec and Park should take an honest look at what the fountain requires to get it back in action — permanently — in a safe, clean way. The department has tossed around cost estimates of $500,000, but that figure has the feel of something pulled out of a bureaucrat’s hat.
Also, deal with the unsightly reality of the fountain backsides facing north and east, now off limits behind a chainlink fence. For starters, how about a creative installation on the (literal) rise and fall of the Embarcadero Freeway, and how its presence shaped everything around it?
Finally, at the very least? Clean off the pigeon droppings.
Chronicle staff writer Dominic Fracassa contributed to this report.
“You could mistake it for a fanciful junkyard.” Late-1960s Chronicle criticism of fountain’s initial design