United Nations Plaza
The Uncertain Future of a Fountain by San Francisco’s
Master Landscape Architect
By Jim Chappell
"By day, they wander the streets with brimming shopping carts and panhandling signs. By night, they are the shapeless bundles on the sidewalk. They are San Francisco's most dysfunctional homeless people – those who live full time on the street – and number between 3,000 and 5,000." So said the San Francisco Chronicle in a November 30, 2003 article. And at some time each 24 hours, most of this army of indigents found their way to United Nations Plaza, home to one of famed Landscape Architect Larry Halprin's important civic fountains. At times there are so many homeless, laying on the brick paving, sleeping, hunched over their shopping carts, or until recently, bathing or defecating in the fountain, that one might not even know the fountain is there.
Of all the places in the city, why here? To listen to a neighborhood group formed a couple of years ago to study the situation you would have to believe that Landscape Architecture causes homelessness. And that this fountain especially causes poverty and mental illness. So dysfunctional is our civic discourse on the subject that a serious proposal emanated from this group and was proposed, and then killed, by the Board of Supervisors (San Francisco's city council) to remove the fountain, and replace it with brick paving. Oh yes, now Landscape Architecture, the flat brick kind, is the cure for homelessness?
In 2002, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) made a comprehensive study of homelessness (Homelessness in a Compassionate City, August 2002, www.spur.org) and guess what? Of the many complex and interrelated causes and treatments of this national tragedy, Landscape Architecture is never mentioned. This does not surprise this readership, but make no mistake about it – one of Halprin's seminal works in his home city was almost on the chopping block for a completely bogus reason.
San Francisco produced three of the most important 20th century modern American Landscape Architects - Tommy Church (for whom Halprin initially worked), Garrett Eckbo, and Lawrence Halprin. However, the local public realm has little to show from these greats. Halprin, now in his 80s, is still active in his profession, with undiminished creative talents. In 2002, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Honor for Design in recognition of his lifetime achievement in the field. And yet, San Francisco has only a handful of his designs, and none maintained and regarded as they should be – or would be elsewhere – as exemplative of the brilliant work of a home-grown son.
How could his home city come so close to destroying this work of art without even consulting with its creator, still very much active and working here? And what can we do to help protect this and similar monuments from wanton destruction by misguided politicians and know-nothings?