Skateboarders at war with city officials in San Francisco over plans to tear down city’s ugliest fountain
Skateboarders are grinding to save San Francisco’s Vaillancourt Fountain, arguing the once-derided brutalist structure has rolled its way into global skateboarding history and deserves to stay put.
While some residents and city officials have long viewed the concrete landmark as an eyesore, skaters say it has become an iconic spot in the sport’s culture, and one worth fighting for.
“That’s Mecca,” said Ted Barrow, a skateboarder and architectural preservationist told The Wall Street Journal.
City planners, however, say the 710-ton fountain, created by Quebecois artist Armand Vaillancourt in the early 1970s, is showing serious wear and tear.
Officials estimate it would cost about $29 million to repair, nearly as much as the planned renovation of Embarcadero Plaza and its surrounding parkland.The plaza, known worldwide in skate circles as EMB, helped shape modern street skating.
However, after the fountain’s water pumps failed, the structure was fenced off over safety concerns, prompting San Francisco’s Recreation and Park Department to move toward dismantling the artwork and potentially placing it in storage during redevelopment. City officials argue the fountain is no longer safe to maintain in its current form.
Skaters say that the plan wipes out more than concrete; it erases history. What was once a much-maligned public artwork — a local newspaper poll said readers hated the initial plans at a ratio of 70 to 1 — has found fierce defenders among skateboarders who helped define the sport’s street style in the 1990s.
Barrow, who has spoken in defense of the fountain at public hearings, added that some of skateboarding’s most influential videos were filmed there.
“People come here just to see it because they feel like they’re on hallowed ground,” he said.
Vaillancourt, now in his mid-90s, has also personally appealed to city officials to preserve his work. The sculpture has stirred controversy from the start. The artist famously carved “Québec Libre” into the concrete during its unveiling, and he insists it was built to last for generations, notably surviving a 1989 earthquake that damaged, then erased, a nearby freeway.
City engineers see it differently. They say corrosion, crumbling concrete, and hazardous materials have turned the fountain into a safety risk that’s no longer realistic to keep standing.
The fountain’s fate now comes down to a public vote scheduled for January 13, after months of back-and-forth between city officials, developers, preservationists and skateboarders who see the site as sacred ground.
Skateboarders are worried about the plaza’s future after concept images from the city and developer BXP revealed wide lawns and new landscaping, but almost none of the hard, skate-friendly surfaces that made EMB a worldwide hotspot.
Jacob Rosenberg, a filmmaker of many iconic 1990s skate videos who recently released a book, Epicenter, documenting EMB’s skateboarding history, called the grassy spaces “terrible.”
