Controversial S.F. fountain not part of Embarcadero Plaza renovation plans, officials say

San Francisco Chronicle​

10-07-2025

The fight for Vaillancourt Fountain heated up Tuesday night at a community meeting where a San Francisco city official said publicly for the first time that the controversial concrete sculpture is not part of the renovation plan for Embarcadero Plaza.
'We did look into keeping the fountain on-site,' Recreation and Park Department Project Manager Eoanna Harrison Goodwin told a decidedly pro-fountain audience, 'but once we got the cost estimate, it is beyond our project budget.'
The revelation, while not the final word on the 710-ton sculpture, was perhaps the most discouraging sign yet for its ardent supporters that its days on Embarcadero Plaza may be numbered.
The blocky Brutalist fountain, a lightning rod for public opinion since its debut a half-century ago, has deteriorated and broken down in recent years. In June, the park department fenced it off after declaring it a public hazard based on a report that concluded a full renovation would cost roughly $17 million.
A new independent estimate now pegs the cost at $29 million, Goodwin said Tuesday — a dramatic jump that earned a collective groan from the crowd. That number did not include the cost of plans, permits and annual upkeep of at least $100,000.
That means fixing the fountain would cost nearly as much as the entire Embarcadero Plaza makeover project, budgeted at $32.5 million, Goodwin said.
The plan is to combine Embarcadero Plaza and the adjacent Sue Bierman Park to form a single 5-acre multiuse park, twice the size of Union Square. The complicated project is a public-private partnership between the Recreation and Park Department, which manages the land; BXP, which owns the four Embarcadero office towers; the Downtown SF Partnership; and the Office of Economic and Workforce Development.
Though the park department maintains the fountain and is indicating it no longer wants it, it does not own the sculpture and has no authority over its possible removal. It is part of the Civic Art Collection, and its fate will eventually be determined by the San Francisco Arts Commission and possibly the Board of Supervisors.
Tuesday's community forum at Codi, a meeting popup at Embarcadero Three, came just one month after the fountain's creator, 95-year-old artist Armand Vaillancourt, made a rare visit from his Montreal home to lobby the park department and the arts commission to preserve his namesake work.
The fountain has been shut off for a year since its pumps broke, but Vaillancourt told the Chronicle that with some cleaning and repairs it would last another 50 years or more.
Vaillancourt was not among the 200 people who RSVP'd for Tuesday's meeting, but his daughter, San Francisco resident Oceania Vaillancourt, attended and made an emotional plea for her father's creation.
'My dad asked me to help him,' said Vaillancourt during the Q&A session after the city's presentation, noting she lives two blocks away and goes by the fountain every day. 'I just can't imagine the fountain not being there,' she said through tears. 'I just hope we can gather the community and hopefully change the decision of removing the fountain.'
Also in attendance were members of the Northern California chapter of Docomomo US, a modernist architecture preservation group that has been staging actions to save the fountain.
The sculpture, which currently sits in the middle of the multiuse area, was not on any of the diagrams presented Tuesday by HOK, the design firm hired for the project. The diagrams showed a location for a 'permanent art piece,' though apparently not the one that is already there, Petra Marar of Docomomo noted.
'The fountain is not on any of the options,' said Marar. 'It feels like it is all or nothing, keeping it or removing it, and it feels like they are removing it.'
Andrew Sullivan, a landscape architect who worked with the famed Embarcadero Plaza designer Lawrence Halprin, said, 'The process that the city went through to determine that the fountain needs to be removed is disingenuous. They predetermined that the demolition of the fountain is a given without any actual design. They just created excuses to get rid of it without any meaningful discussion.'
The design of the park has also yet to be determined. The future unification of Embarcadero Plaza and Sue Bierman Park will be continued at a third meeting to be scheduled this fall. The park will then enter the design phase.