Skateboarders mourn as San Francisco’s iconic Vaillancourt fountain is dismantled

A surreal and fitting end came for one of San Francisco’s most divisive public artworks when the Vaillancourt fountain, a massive concrete sculpture dominating Embarcadero Plaza since the 1970s, burst into flames.

The hulking fountain’s angled arms were being dismantled in early May after the city voted to potentially replace it with an open, grassy park – a decision mourned by skateboarders like Ted Barrow, who argued the city was losing an important piece of its skate culture and architectural heritage.

As crews began dismantling, a spark from a torch-cutter likely ignited debris that had accumulated in one of the fountain’s tubes during its last year of dormancy, sending flames and smoke into the air over a structure that once pumped 30,000 gallons of water. It was a perfect last riposte for a fountain that was never not controversial.

Built in 1971, the fountain designed by artist Armand Vaillancourt was the dynamic centerpiece of a red-brick plaza that became the epicenter of San Francisco’s skateboarding scene in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the most photographed and filmed skate cities globally, San Francisco’s unique concrete-covered character is ideal for skateboarding.

Though the fountain itself offered little for skateboarders except for the daring few who attempted to roll down its chutes, its proximity to EMB – the acronym for the crew of skaters there, “Embarco’s Most Blunted”, and the Embarcadero location – exalted the fountain from backdrop to landmark. Along with the Ferry Building across the street, Vaillancourt’s fountain was the beacon that drew skaters to the plaza, once the center of skateboarding’s universe.

In recent years, the fountain became a touchstone for debates about the legacy of modernist spaces in the city. Adjacent property owners and San Francisco’s parks department ran a campaign to condemn the fountain under an emergency injunction, claiming it was no longer functioning or safe. Others simply declared it an eyesore.

Activists, skateboarders and Vaillancourt himself argued the city should maintain and preserve the work for its cultural significance. Skateboarders showed up to community input meetings, requested private chats with the parks department and generated online petitions to try to save the fountain and plaza. Barrow started a petition to acknowledge the skateboarding history at Embarcadero.

After many debates over the aesthetic merits of the fountain, the San Francisco Arts Commission voted to decommission it. The fountain is currently being taken apart piece by piece at a cost of $4 million for “storage and further assessment”.

Lawrence Halprin’s Embarcadero Plaza and Vaillancourt’s fountain were designed together as part of a dynamic vision of what San Francisco might be. Born of the era of freeways that drained cities of their middle-class residents, the fountain, plaza and integrated subway system were part of an attempt to sustain vibrant urbanity when most people shopped and socialized in suburbs.

The plaza and fountain boldly evoked medieval piazzas and baroque waterworks, encouraging immersive interaction – visitors could carefully traipse across concrete lily pads behind torrents of water – and get a sense of rambunctious nature within the density of the concrete jungle. It was originally next to a freeway, but also next to a four-block-long mall, sandwiched by parks, pedestrian boulevards and empty piers.

What made the fountain special, for Barrow, was its immediate recognizability. Nothing else in the world looked like it. Growing up worshiping at the radiant altar of street skateboarding in San Francisco, Vaillancourt’s fountain loomed large in his teenage fantasies. From the late 1980s onward, every skateboarder recognized EMB long before it appeared in video games.

The best-known spots in skateboarding are often named after works of art nearby, from Love Park in Philadelphia (Robert Indiana’s sculpture at JFK Plaza), Pulaski Park in DC (Kazimierz Chodziński’s equestrian statue at Freedom Plaza) or “Tinker Toy”, the skater-generated nickname for Joan Miró’s monumental avian form at Chase Tower in Houston. Each plaza, built from 1965 to 1980, offered smooth granite surfaces, steps and ledges, anchored by a dynamic work of modern art.

Each hours-long session skating around these modernist sculptures was, though skaters may not have known it then, closer to an immersive art experience. Spending time in or around these works generated new interpretations beyond the stated goals of the projects. The plazas, none built for skateboarding, each produced new forms of public life, from the ground up, led by skateboarders.

Halprin likely could not have imagined his red-brick plaza at the foot of Market Street would become the epicenter of street skating some 20 years after its completion – with important additions by William Turnbull Jr in 1982 of tiered steps, seating and a stage that became the most famous features of the skate spot – but the open-ended nature of the plaza appealed specifically to skateboarders. They needed the open space, smooth surfaces and unexpected configurations of street architecture that Embarcadero offered. Vaillancourt’s fountain was a summation of the urge to skate street: challenging, potentially painful, but worth it if committed.

While eulogizing the fountain, Barrow clarified that it was never brutalist, as many critics have described it. The fountain was rough concrete and massive in scale, but most brutalist structures are raw with serrated edges forged by creation. Instead, giant sculpted vermiculated patterns on the piers in the back and oversized, sediment-like protuberances encrusting the square tubes in front evoked the striated patterns of travertine.

Riffing on the minuscule patterns of fountains like the Trevi in Rome, Vaillancourt harmonized his sculpture with the late-modernist cityscape. Calling this confrontational fountain “brutalist” flattens the textured and participatory aspects that made the plaza special.

Less special have been the banal renderings of what the new Embarcadero Plaza might become, from an AI-generated mashup of everything bad about Manhattan’s High Line and Chicago’s Grant Park transposed to the foot of the Embarcadero Center, to the globular expansion of sure-to-be-soggy green lawns in the most current iteration. While the original hardscape plaza was open-ended and designed for active play and passive leisure, each new rendering suggests specific, atomized activities.

The May 6 fire was quickly extinguished and Vaillancourt’s fountain will soon be gone. Many modernist projects for city centers have not aged well, but few sparked a paradigm shift in skateboarding like Embarcadero. The fire lit by that plaza, the urban skate scenes around the world directly inspired by Embarcadero’s incandescent example, still burns in imagination, while these cherished skate spots have become landmark destinations in cities other than San Francisco. Ted Barrow, PhD, is an art historian, writer, curator and lifelong skateboarder who lives in San Francisco. He hosts the YouTube series This Old Ledge for Thrasher magazine.