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.”
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