A lawyer representing the artist Armand Vaillancourt has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the City of San Francisco in response to the controversial plan to demolish the 96-year-old artist’s namesake Brutalist fountain at Embarcadero Plaza. The 1971 Vaillancourt Fountain is threatened by a public-private redevelopment scheme that aims to remake the plaza and connect it to an adjacent city park. A recent public outcry has called for the unique work’s preservation.
Though the redevelopment effort is being coordinated by the city’s Recreation and Parks Department (Rec), the fountain is technically owned by the San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC). As previously reported by Sam Whiting in the San Francisco Chronicle, Rec’s general manager sent a letter to top officials of the arts commission on 18 August asking for SFAC to “proceed with the formal deaccession of the Vaillancourt Fountain from the Civic Art Collection and its removal from Embarcadero Plaza”. The city had already determined that the monumental fountain was hazardous and fenced it off.
The recent letter from Vaillancourt’s lawyer, dated 29 August, demands “that the city and all other parties implicated in the redevelopment of Sue Bierman Park and Embarcadero Plaza immediately cease and desist from taking any steps whatsoever that may endanger or damage the Vaillancourt Fountain”, including “demolition, dismantlement or physical modification of the work”.
Jack McCarthy, a local museum worker and board member at Docomomo—a non-profit devoted to the study and protection of Modernist architecture—is not convinced that the city is handling the fountain issue in good faith. “If thousands of local, national and international voices continue to be ignored, it’s unclear if any amount of community feedback or expert input would cause the project to change course,” he tells The Art Newspaper. “It also raises the question of whether San Francisco Recreation and Park Department is fulfilling its obligations to the public and following the established procedures for public and stakeholder input.”
Whether the city heeds Vaillancourt’s letter, or if SFAC listens to the growing chorus of voices opposed to the proposed demolition of Vaillancourt Fountain, remains to be seen. Irrespective of these decisions, experts seem to agree that the city, Rec and SFAC have collectively damaged their reputations in their handling of the situation.
“The San Francisco Arts Commission could honour their commitment as stewards of art held in public trust, or they could vote to deaccession the Vaillancourt Fountain—an action tantamount to a demolition permit,” says Charles A. Birnbaum, the president and chief executive of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. “But they can’t do both and expect their legitimacy not to be permanently harmed.”
