Heavy lifting will begin Wednesday morning to remove Vaillancourt Fountain from San Francisco’s Embarcadero Plaza, after an appeals court rejected a preservation group’s bid to stay the disassembly of the massive concrete sculpture after 54 years on the waterfront.
A 265-ton crane will arrive to lift the 10-ton cantilevered arms of the artwork and place them on a flatbed truck. They will be transported to off-site storage for up to three years while the city Arts Commission, which owns the sculpture as part of the civic art collection, decides what to do with it permanently.
The disassembly began Friday, the day that a state appeals court issued a one-line decision denying a temporary stay filed on behalf of the Friends of the Plaza, an activist group determined to save the 710-ton Brutalist abstraction by Montreal sculptor Armand Vaillancourt. A lawsuit to determine the permanent fate of the sculpture is set for trial in August.
The Board of Supervisors earlier this year voted to allow the sculpture and fountain to be removed, at least temporarily, after the city planning department determined that it constituted a public safety hazard. Fountain preservationists sued and asked for a stay to prevent the sculpture’s removal. But a Superior court judge denied the request, and it was upheld by the appeals court.
“We appreciate that the Court of Appeals denied the stay and allowed the City to continue its work to carefully disassemble and store the fountain in order to study the deterioration and evaluate options,” said Jen Kwart, spokesperson for City Attorney David Chiu. “The project protects the public while preserving options for the fountain’s long-term future.”
On Friday, a 70-ton crane did a test lift and removed two sections of one of the arms and placed them on a flatbed for transport to storage. On Monday, drilling and other prep work was done to make way for the big lift on Wednesday.
Neither a spokesperson for Friends of the Plaza nor Sonoma County attorney Susan Brandt-Hawley, who is representing the group, responded to requests for comment Monday.
The removal, expected to cost $4 million and take several months, is being paid for and undertaken by the Recreation and Park Department, which is responsible for maintenance of the fountain and the surrounding Embarcadero Plaza.
The entire area is being redesigned as a new 5-acre park, in a $40 million partnership between the Rec and Park Department, various city agencies, and BXP, the real estate firm that owns the Embarcadero Center office towers that abut the plaza.
Vaillancourt Fountain, which opened in 1972 as a major attraction, with water cascading out of its concrete arms, had fallen into disrepair and been turned off and fenced off. It is not part of the future park, which is in the design phase, with construction scheduled to begin in late 2026 or early 2027.