Fire breaks out during Vaillancourt Fountain dismantling at Embarcadero Plaza

A torch-cutting crew trying to dismantle one of San Francisco’s most divisive public artworks ended up putting out a fire inside it. As workers removed sections of the Vaillancourt Fountain at Embarcadero Plaza on Wednesday, May 6, debris inside the fountain’s steel tubes ignited, turning an already charged demolition into a more dramatic scene in the city’s waterfront heart.

The San Francisco Arts Commission said the flame was quickly extinguished and no injuries were reported. The incident did not spread beyond the work zone, but it sharpened attention on a project that has become about much more than concrete and steel. It is now part of the city’s argument over safety, preservation, downtown reinvention and who gets to decide what public space should look like.

The 40-foot fountain, designed by Québécois artist Armand Vaillancourt with landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and completed in 1971, has long divided San Franciscans. Made of precast concrete square tubes, the brutalist structure has been celebrated by some as a landmark of modern civic art and dismissed by others as a relic that no longer fits the Embarcadero. Its dismantling is part of the Embarcadero Plaza and Sue Bierman Park Renovation Project, which the city says will transform the area into a five-acre waterfront park.

City officials have said the fountain posed public-safety concerns, citing structural deterioration, corrosion, lead and asbestos. They have also described it as an attractive nuisance because people have been climbing on it. The San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department said the fountain is being carefully disassembled over several months, and the removal is budgeted at $4 million.

The Arts Commission approved removal and storage of the fountain on November 3, 2025, after preservation supporters pushed to save it. A legal challenge was still pending when the work began. At a September 5, 2025 Arts Commission meeting, preservation advocate Bob Pullum of Docomomo US argued the fountain should be preserved as an important modern work of art.

The fire added a vivid twist to a dispute that has already forced San Franciscans to confront what is worth keeping at the waterfront and what can be taken apart in the name of safety and redevelopment. For supporters of removal, the project clears the way for a new public landscape. For preservationists, each cut in the fountain feels like another piece of the city’s midcentury identity disappearing from Embarcadero Plaza.