Vaillancourt Fountain, the sculpture at Embarcadero Plaza that is beloved by some and derided by others, took a big step closer to removal Wednesday afternoon, after a San Francisco judge paved the way for its dismantling.
For 55 years, the fountain, named after its creator, Québécois artist Armand Vaillancourt, has been hard to miss. Installed in 1971, Vaillancourt dedicated his 40-foot, 710-ton sculpture made of square concrete tubes to freedom everywhere, and proposed an alternative title: Québec Libre!
Friends of the Plaza, a group dedicated to the fountain’s preservation, calls it everything from brutalist to abstract expressionist to a historical treasure. Allan Temko, the late architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, said it resembles the poop of a giant dog with square intestines.
In its sturdier days, 30,000 gallons of water, sometimes colored with a chemical called blue lagoon, flowed through the fountain’s tubes and splashed into the pool below. The fountain’s concrete, which contains asbestos, has crumbled over time, and its structural steel has corroded. One of the cantilevered steel arms buckled, and now rests on another arm below it. Its last functioning water pump failed in May 2024.
In 2025, city agencies and the Board of Supervisors deemed it at risk of collapsing and concluded it should be removed as part of the plaza’s redevelopment plan.
Since last year, the fountain has been fenced off.
During Wednesday’s hearing at San Francisco Superior Court, Deputy City Attorney Kristen Jensen detailed the “kinds of intrusions” Recreation and Park Department officials have encountered, including “people climbing on the fountain, skateboarding off the 10-ton arms of the fountain, sleeping in the arms of the fountain, and graffitiing the fountain.”
Jensen was making her case against a request by Friends of the Plaza for an emergency order to spare the fountain until a more complete hearing in August. Susan Brandt-Hawley, a lawyer for the group, claimed San Francisco labeled the fountain a public threat as a pretext to do an end-run around the required regulatory process to remove it.
San Francisco Superior Court Judge Jeffrey S. Ross found that engineers had properly concluded the fountain poses a threat to the public.
“I’m limited to looking at the record, and I find the record is replete with evidence to support the decision that the city made,” Ross said.
Jen Kwart, a spokesperson for City Attorney David Chiu, said in a text message to Gazetteer that as a result of the ruling, the fountain will be carefully disassembled and stored, allowing experts to study its deterioration and “evaluate options” for its future.
Last year, Armand Vaillancourt told the CBC that his life had “been poisoned” by San Francisco’s decision. His daughter, Oceania Vaillancourt, was in court yesterday to observe the hearing. Asked if her father would attend, she told Gazetteer SF that he is 96 years old and at home in Montréal.
In an emailed statement, Friends of the Plaza said that Ross’s decision allows the fountain to be removed before environmental concerns are addressed. The group is dedicated to “public discourse about our public spaces and public art,” and will “explore legal options to ensure outcomes that align with that belief.”
The Recreation and Park Department and other city departments will decide when the dismantling of Vaillancourt Fountain will begin. It will likely be gone, or in pieces, before the final hearing in August. “There is no longer anything legally preventing the city from moving forward,” Kwart said.
