If you look closely at the 2023 video of Zach “Ducky” Kovacs skateboarding down the tallest peak of Vaillancourt Fountain at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza, you can see the piece of concrete plastered onto the structure that sent him flying into the murky water below.
Two and one-half years later, Kovacs recalled that piece of concrete, and its critical role in the ride that put him on the January 2024 cover of Thrasher magazine.
“I remember landing in the water, and I looked up at it after, I was like, ‘OK, so that wasn’t the intended goal,’” Kovacs told Gazetteer. “Then I’m standing in the water, and I was like, ‘There’s no landing this. I’m not gonna do it again.’”
Kovacs couldn’t attempt that drop in even if he wanted to.
It was announced last week that as of Monday, the city will begin dismantling Vaillancourt Fountain, which it has deemed a public safety threat. The structure’s tortured 55-year history has produced complicated feelings, which were on full display earlier this month when a San Francisco judge rejected a last-gasp legal bid to spare it.
The city has wasted little time picking up the public art piece one critic described as resembling feces “deposited by a giant concrete dog with square intestines.”
Five months before Kovacs undertook his stunt move, he had a steel plate removed from his ankle. It was surgically inserted after he broke his ankle doing a different trick. The drop in was a move that didn’t demand too much of his back foot. Kovacs said he also conceived of the drop in as a video that his friend Mikey Guzman could shoot.
At the time, Kovacs was working for Deluxe Distribution, a skate company in the Mission. He hit up Michael Burnett, Thrasher’s photographer and editor, to shoot the stunt, hoping a photo might make it into the magazine. He had no expectations that it could be a cover shot.
Kovacs doesn’t have strong feelings about Vaillancourt Fountain’s removal. The Embarcadero, however, and the plaza in particular, are legendary for skateboarders worldwide. He has joined previous efforts to block redevelopment plans that would impede skaters there.
“You take down the fountain, and it sets a precedent to just redo everything,” he said. “That’s what kind of happens in San Francisco, and with other big cities. They say they’re going to remove one thing, and then they take the next step of removing everything that made the plaza important.”
Kovacs now lives in Los Angeles, where he’s sponsored by Heroin Skateboards. He maintains a broad-minded view of the chunk of cement that prevented him from completing his ride down the fountain’s full length. Like the bricks around the plaza, he holds a certain reverence for the structure’s spackled concrete.
“With certain objects, there’s a texture to grind on, that lends a certain feeling, that just makes it good for skating,” he said. If only the city agreed.
