Wall Street Journal picking up the story, kinda surreal to see that Carroll manual flip across the mast of the WSJ
Lots of pics and clips, here's the text pasted:
San Francisco Battles Skateboarders Over the City’s Ugliest Fountain
Critics call it a ‘jumble of nothing’ and the concrete deposit of a giant dog with square intestines. To skaters, Vaillancourt Fountain is hallowed ground.
Skateboarders are trying to pull off their gnarliest trick: saving San Francisco’s most hated monument from extinction.
The city wants to take down Vaillancourt Fountain. Skaters say the structure—brutalist water-pumping limbs of mottled white concrete that rise out of the ground near the waterfront—is an icon.
Skateboarders worldwide know the area as EMB, shorthand for Embarcadero Plaza. It’s where, in the early 1990s, the activity evolved out of skate parks and empty swimming pools into a global urban phenomenon that could be done nearly anywhere there were benches, stairs and railings.
“That’s Mecca,” said Ted Barrow, a skateboarder and architectural preservationist who has defended the fountain at public hearings. “The most important videos were filmed there. People come here just to see it because they feel like they’re on hallowed ground.”
The fountain has always been controversial. Two years before it was built, the San Francisco Examiner polled readers on what they thought of the design. Readers hated it, by a ratio of about 70 to 1.
Local sculptor Beniamino Bufano described it as “a jumble of nothing.” The San Francisco Chronicle’s architecture critic said it resembled something “deposited by a concrete dog with square intestines.”
But it was also the perfect symbol of the city’s radical 1970s. Quebecois designer Armand Vaillancourt befriended the Black Panthers and originally wanted to name it the Malcolm X Fountain. After feuding with the city and being snubbed for the inauguration event, Vaillancourt showed up anyway, jumped into the fountain and painted the separatist message “Quebec Libre” onto its side using red paint and a stencil.
Vaillancourt, 96, also flew to San Francisco this past spring to try to convince city officials to leave his masterpiece alone.
Hallowed ground or not, San Francisco sees the fountain as a 710-ton headache that would cost $29 million to fix. After its water pumps failed, it was fenced off to the public. The city worried parts of it might fall down, Eoanna Goodwin, a project manager with the local Recreation & Park Department, said at a public hearing in November.
The fountain “contains deteriorated concrete, corroded structural steel and hazardous materials and its mechanical and electrical systems are beyond repair,” Goodwin said.
Poppycock, says Vaillancourt. His fountain was designed to last hundreds of years. A 1989 earthquake damaged a nearby freeway, which is now gone, but the fountain survived. “C’est très solide,” he said during a Zoom interview.
Holding up a January 2024 issue of Thrasher Magazine featuring Zachary “Ducky” Kovacs skateboarding down the fountain, Vaillancourt said he was delighted his work had become a skateboarding icon. “This doesn’t look like a sculpture that’s about to fall down,” he said.
“I think it’s just important to keep public spaces like that, ”said Kovacs, who during the stunt hit a chunk of cement that bucked him into the water.
Goodwin’s department is cooking up plans to put the fountain in storage, saying there is a safety emergency. That plan was approved by the city’s Arts Commission in November. Critics say this mothballing will amount to a death warrant, and have asked San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to give the fountain another chance.
A vote on the matter is set for Jan. 13.
Adding to sidewalk surfers’ dismay, the City and property developer BXP are working on a new plan. Early renderings show a plaza with acres of un-skatable grass.
“I think those public grassy spaces are terrible,” said Jacob Rosenberg, who filmed many of those world-changing videos on his Canon camcorder back in the 90s. He’s campaigned to save the fountain, and rushed to put out a book documenting skateboarding at EMB.
That book, entitled Epicenter, was released on Nov. 21.
A City spokeswoman said that current plans aren’t final. “We’ve heard a wide range of perspectives from various stakeholders, including skateboarders, and that input will inform the next phase of design,” she said.
In 2016, Philadelphia razed another skateboard Mecca, known as Love Park. Skaters there convinced the city to preserve some of the park, and a year later Gustav Svanborg Edén, a skateboarder and city official in Malmö, Sweden, moved 17 tons of concrete slabs, ledges, trash cans, along with a 1966 streetlight, across the Atlantic to establish the Love Malmö skate park.
Edén hopes San Francisco’s fountain stays, even though many of EMB’s most skateboardable features have already been razed. He remembers it as the backdrop to the most important skateboarding videos he watched as a 12-year-old. “Clearly the skating was the onstage play, but the Vaillancourt Fountain was the set design behind it,” he said.
But much as he loves the fountain, Edén doesn’t see it landing in Malmö. He doesn’t want to turn his city into a “potpourri Disney World of skate spots,” he said.
Malmö isn’t skateboarding’s only act of historical preservation. In Greenfield, Wisc., skateboarders literally unearthed a classic 1970s skate park called the Turf.
Mike Neitzke, Greenfield’s mayor, is a fan of the fountain.
“There are probably thousands of parks in the country that have grass,” he said. “There’s only one park in the world that has that fountain, that’s such an integral part of history.”
“You can sit on the grass anywhere,” he said.
Write to Robert McMillan at
[email protected]
Topic: Ted Barrow's "Save EMB" article in the SF Standard (Read 2003 times)