Vaillancourt Fountain and the Embarcadero

Vaillancourt Fountain, San Francisco

The sculpture looked like the ruins of the adjacent Embarcadero Freeway, and to at least one critic, it was more like "A pile of excrement from a large dog with square entrails", as Herb Caen passed along in his column in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The cascading water drowns out the freeway noise and challenges the user to stay dry while exploring the sculpture.  It is successful participatory urban art.

The sculpture is named Québec libre! and it echoed in material and structure the short-sighted folly of the Embarcadero Freeway.  The irony is that the freeway was torn down after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that rendered it unsafe, while the sculpture remains.

The name of the sculpture is obviously political, but I have never cared about nor have I been interested enough to learn why Canadian politics landed on the embarcadero in San Francisco.

...

Efficient traffic engineers routed a freeway in front of the Ferry building, a San Francisco landmark.

As a 12 year old, I remember thinking that it must be what progress looked like.  At the time, I was traveling with my father and brother, heading to Seattle from Burbank.  My father was looking for work and for a change, I presume--I never questioned why we were moving or to where, or even with whom I would be living --and I was happily along for the ride.  We stayed at a motel on Market Street near Van Ness Avenue.  A friend and colleague of my father visited us in our room, but I can't remember who it was.  George Lamont? Russ Coghlin?

George Lamont

Russ Coghlin

How to separate citizens from their port..

The Embarcadero Freeway was planned to improve the movement of automobile traffic through San Francisco, but sanity prevailed in time to save the neighborhoods.

As short as the freeway was, it provided a useful link on my commute from the Presidio, where I was stationed in 1970 at the Letterman Army Institute of Research, and south of Market, where my wife worked for Pacific Telephone.  I took the Folsom Street exit, and it put me close to 3rd and Howard, where I picked up my pregnant wife after work at her office building.

I almost died on that freeway riding with a friend in his Triumph TR3, but that's another story.

Watercolor by Dong Kingman

Tear down

San Francisco Embarcadero Fog 
     1947 Fred Lyons

In 1958, my twin bro and I were living in South San Francisco with our aunt and uncle, a longshoreman, who worked on the embarcadero a few piers south of the Ferry Building. We'd accompany our aunt when she'd pick him up in the late afternoon.  The picture is as I remember it, but we were in a '49 Plymouth.




The Ferry Building was designed as the terminus to the most important street in San Francisco.

The interior is a friendly space with ample natural light and intimacy thanks to the delicate steel trusses. The concrete over metal decking floors provide solidity.

At least one structure--the new high school in Salinas, California-- was architecturally fashioned after these elements.