Vaillancourt Fountain
fountain in San Francisco
Vaillancourt Fountain, sometimes called Québec libre!, is a large fountain currently undergoing disassembly and removal at the Embarcadero Plaza in San Francisco. It was designed by the Québécois artist Armand Vaillancourt in collaboration with the plaza's landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, and completed in 1971.
The fountain is constructed out of precast concrete square tubes. When fully installed, the fountain was about 40 feet (12 m) high. Long considered controversial because of its stark, modernist appearance, the fountain was the subject of several unsuccessful proposals to demolish it over the years.
In October 2025, San Francisco determined the fountain to be a historic resource eligible for the California Register of Historical Resources. In November 2025, the San Francisco Arts Commission voted to approve an emergency disassembly and removal recommended by the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Department, citing concerns about structural deterioration. Removal of the piece began in April 2026. Removal and storage for up to three years is estimated to cost $4.4 million.
Location
The fountain occupied a highly visible spot on the downtown San Francisco waterfront, in Embarcadero Plaza (formerly Justin Herman Plaza), where Market Street meets The Embarcadero.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3076099. Authority coordinates are 37.795, -122.395. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2025 and 2026.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vaillancourt Fountain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.