Maintenance Money Down the Drain At Embarcadero Plaza’s Vaillancourt Fountain?
San Francisco Recreation & Parks erected fencing on Monday June 9 around the Vaillancourt Fountain in the threatened Lawrence Halprin-designed Embarcadero Plaza citing safety concerns they say were raised in a 122-page report by the architecture, planning, and conservation firm Page & Turnbull. The report states: “Overall, Vaillancourt Fountain exhibits a range of deterioration that must be addressed for it to continue to be enjoyed safely. That said, the fountain does not appear to have yet deteriorated beyond repair, though certain systems and components have, and there may be a variety of approaches to treatment to be explored in future phases that could stabilize and restore it.”
One of the appendices found at the very end of the report is a four-page May 2025 memo from San Francisco Recreation & Parks (pp. 119–122), that claims the fountain has “historically required extensive, near-daily maintenance” (p. 120), and that has “averaged approximately $100,000 per year, inclusive of documented labor costs, travel and equipment time, material handling, and additional support activities which reflect tens of thousands of cumulative labor hours” (p. 120).
So why is the fountain in the condition it’s in if S.F. Rec. & Parks has done “extensive, near-daily maintenance” at a cost of “approximately $100,000 per year,” presumably since the fountain was completed in 1971. What does this say about the city park department’s maintenance protocols and judgement that after spending, by their estimate, millions of dollars the fountain is in such a degraded state?
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) recently published a Landslide update about the plaza and fountain, an essay from international fountain expert James Garland about its significance, and a video about the 95-year old Armand Vaillancourt by his son Alexis. In fact, Vaillancourt and his son recently traveled from Montreal to San Francisco to plead personally with city officials on behalf of the artist’s enigmatic fountain. “I’m here to save that piece of art,” Vaillancourt told the San Francisco Chronicle during his May 22 visit.
Deferred or inadequate maintenance, especially for designed landscapes with integral water features, is all too often the reason parks and water features fall into decline and are threatened with erasure. In May 2023, the City of Charlotte, NC, destroyed Thomas Polk Park, a rare public commission by a former Halprin employee, Angela Danadjieva, which James Garland called “culturally important.” Two exceptional works by the late landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg—Pershing Park in Washington, DC, and Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis, MN, were also threatened. The former has been rehabilitated and modified to be a national World War I memorial while the latter was the subject of a thoughtful rehabilitation that has garnered much acclaim.
The city is leaning on the report to claim the fountain is unsafe and they’ve fenced it off to reinforce the point. A Rec & Parks spokesperson also told SFGate that restoring the fountain would be “a very expensive and hazardous endeavor,” and one that could cost between $12 million and $17 million, an estimate thus far uncorroborated. We can expect accelerating deferred maintenance and further messaging from the city that paints Embarcadero Plaza and the Vaillancourt Fountain in a negative light to advance the false choice to either revitalize or demolish the historically significant site. All of this distracts from what may be a leading reason for the site’s current condition.
Lawrence Halpin himself brought creativity and innovation to the city’s rich and unrivaled historic fabric, thus crafting landscapes that were not generic, but were unique to their setting. However, he was also keenly aware of the pressures on landscapes, especially to monetize them. In TCLF’s Pioneers Oral History with Halprin, he was particularly pointed about “developers who seize every open space that you can imagine . . . especially if they're wonderful places that you've made, they then want to grasp them and make some place there that's going return on an investment. On that level they're terribly vulnerable, much more vulnerable than buildings or structures or pieces of engineering.”
