Vaillancourt Fountain Artist is Lawyering Up
Public education and advocacy, good journalism, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) type records requests, and other actions are raising valid questions and yielding some troubling answers about the City of San Francisco’s efforts to demolish the Lawrence Halprin-designed Embarcadero Plaza with its signature Vaillancourt Fountain (also known as “Québec Libre!”), and neighboring Sue Bierman Park. The effort is being led by the city's Recreation and Park Department (RPD), but sign off by the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), which owns the fountain, is required because the work is part of the Civic Art Collection. On Friday, August 29, Sébastien Lormeau, a Montreal-based attorney for the fountain’s 96-year-old sculptor, Armand Vaillancourt, notified officials at the SFAC and elsewhere that they must “immediately cease and desist from taking any steps whatsoever that may endanger or damage the Vaillancourt Fountain [emphasis in the original].” He added, that his client “will pursue all available remedies provided by law” including injunctive relief [emphasis in the original]."
The letter was a boon to the ongoing efforts of numerous advocates, including Docomomo U.S. and its Northern California chapter, ICOMOS, TCLF, and others. On Friday, September 5, advocates got another boost from a spirited opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle by Ted Barrow, an art historian and skateboarding afficionado, that closed with a call to civic pride:
Embarcadero Plaza and the Vaillancourt Fountain have remained a cohesive, provocative work of civic art—part traditional Italian piazza, part Modernist plaza, wholly San Franciscan.
With restoration, they could continue to be the dynamic public stage they were always meant to be. Shirking that responsibility in favor of an as-yet-to-be-seen private developer’s idea of parkland is not just negligent, it is a betrayal of the once-accepted notion that in San Francisco, public art and architecture make the city itself a place of wonder.
The proposed new park would be immediately adjacent to several properties owned by real estate developer BXP, which has pledged $10 million to the estimated $30-35 million cost of the new site. As previously reported, maintenance for the fountain has been outsourced to BXP for many years; RPD has maintenance obligations for the plaza. According to a Public Project Application submitted by BXP's Senior Vice President for Development, Aaron Fenton, on July 25, 2025, the new “approximately 5-acre park” ... “will enhance accessibility, safety, and programming while reconnecting the park to the Bay. Planned improvements include a multi-purpose event lawn and stage, new public art, an enclosed dog play area, outdoor fitness stations, stormwater gardens, expanded seating and picnic areas, interpretive signage, and improved circulation.”
The application narrative continues: “The Vaillancourt Fountain, designed by Armand Vaillancourt and completed in 1971 as part of Lawrence Halprin’s Embarcadero Plaza, was conceived to convey dynamic energy, be participatory, and mask the noise of the Embarcadero Freeway. With the freeway long gone and the fountain inoperable, it now fragments the plaza, obstructs views, and no longer supports a safe, functional, or future-ready civic space.”
The assertions cum conclusions in the final sentence are curious. The absence of the freeway is immaterial. The fountain is inoperable because the SFAC, which is responsible for it, and BXP and RPD, to which maintenance was delegated, appear to have failed to uphold their responsibilities. The fountain doesn’t fragment the plaza; it’s an integral and central component in scale with its urban context. Arguably, the addition of pickleball courts fragments the plaza. And absent from consideration is that the fountain is also an important witness to historic protests, gatherings, and other significant events.
But, it’s the thoroughly unoriginal mix of unsubstantiated claims, innuendo, and jargon that is constantly recycled and weaponized—the same scenario resulted in the demolition of Thomas Polk Park in Charlotte, N.C.—when a site is targeted for demolition and redevelopment: the current site “no longer supports a safe, functional, or future-ready civic space.”
“Unsafe,” check the box. “Not functional,” check the box. “Future-ready civic space”? What does that even mean?
The future of the Vaillancourt Fountain, as reported earlier, is in the hands of the Arts Commission. If commissioners vote on October 6 to deaccession the fountain from the city’s art collection, demolition could begin this coming January. In the lead up to the final vote, will commissioners also recycle claims about safety, and the need for a “functional” “future-ready civic space”? Will commissioners lean on justifications provided by RPD? Remember, RPD claims the fountain has “historically required extensive, near-daily maintenance,” 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.” However, as TCLF learned from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) type request, these claims are vastly overestimated.
And will members of the San Francisco Arts Commission cite the current inoperability of the fountain, for which they bear primary responsibility, as justification for deaccessioning? By voting to facilitate demolition the commission members are, in effect, granting themselves a pardon for their own failures as stewards. Should that be acceptable?
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Embarcadero Plaza
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