Celebrating—and Maybe Rescuing—New York’s “Fabulous Fountains”

By Phyllis Eckhaus

New York City’s fountains need more friends.

I like to imagine that Stephanie Azzarone’s fascinating fount of fountain lore, Fabulous Fountains of New York, will open the floodgates of affection and attention. Her coffee table compendium of 72 favorites across five boroughs—lavishly photographed by Robert F. Rodriguez—include a few of what she describes as “the forgotten and forlorn,” dry and dysfunctional.

And they could break your heart. For example, the Wireless Operators Memorial, at the Battery at Pearl and State Streets, dedicated in 1915, commemorates the extraordinary sailors who selflessly chose to go down with the ship—staying at their posts to send wireless telegraphs of disaster. Best known is Jack Phillips, who went down with the RMS Titanic. As Azzarone comments, “Ironically, the memorial to those who lost their lives at sea, situated in a city once famed for its seaport, has long been without running water.” She describes the apparently homeless people “finding respite” on the benches nearby almost as if they are permanent poignant features of the site.

Village Fountains

Fortunately, many of our Village fountains are less neglected, and most remain flush and functional. (A minor gripe: Azzarone sometimes avoids telling us when a fountain is now just dry statuary, or serving as a planter. Maybe she’s afraid she’ll depress us. Or that she’d need to retitle her book to add reference to “former fountains.”)

There’s the Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park, that “functions today”—constructed in 1888 and restored in 1992, it was originally intended to encourage the East Village locals then living in what was known as “Little Germany” to drink water, not beer.

Also in Tompkins Square Park is a tiny and delicate working fountain, a nearly-hidden remembrance of a huge catastrophe. The 1906 Slocum Memorial Fountain, between Avenues A and B at East 9th Street, is a nine-foot-tall, six-foot-wide pink marble reminder of the saddest and most deadly New York City disaster before 9/11: the deaths of over a thousand passengers and crew—overwhelmingly women and children from Little Germany—who perished on a 1904 recreational summer excursion when the atrociously-maintained ship burst into flames en route to a planned Long Island picnic.

Washington Square Park is currently blessed with a sunken-pool fountain that is big and wet enough to encourage play and splashing about; the Rodriguez photo captures “one overheated soul happily soaking himself, eyes and head thrown back, smack in the middle of the geyser.” Azzarone describes the multiple iterations of the fountain, first dating to 1852. She also details the many historic occasions crowds have gathered at the site—including a 19th century rally of stonemasons against prison labor and a 20th century “Beatnik Riot” protesting restrictions on folksingers.

To my surprise, the elegant and seemingly Victorian Jackson Square Fountain, in Jackson Square Park, between Eighth and Greenwich Avenues, is relatively new, a 1990 work designed to evoke the park’s 19th century origins. In Victorian times, the park was a “viewing park”—visible from the outside, but not open to the public.

Azzarone doesn’t say so, but apparently the monumental and elaborate James “Drinking Fountain” in Union Square, dedicated in 1881, is now a planter. Another promotion for temperance, it features a Madonna-like figure with a plump baby and young son, plus lions’ heads, birds and butterflies, and salamanders. There used to be drinking cups beneath the spouts, attached with chains, for use by thirsty passersby.

 

Grand Waterworks

Not surprisingly, some of the city’s most impressive—and working!—fountains are attached to famed Manhattan settings, among them the 1930s-era golden Prometheus Fountain and lengthy Channel Gardens embellishing Rockefeller Center; the expansive Columbus Circle Fountain installed in 2005; the Revson Fountain at Lincoln Center, in 2009 replacing the Philip Johnson original; and of course the beloved Angel of the Waters Fountain at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, completed in 1873 by sculptor Emma Stebbins, the first woman to receive a New York City commission for a major public work.

Then there are the midtown waterfalls, delightful in sound as well as sight and touch. Technically waterworks, not fountains, they enliven publicly accessible, private pocket parks, such as the Greenacre Park on East 51st Street, between Second and Third Avenues, and Paley Park, on East 53rd Street, between Fifth and Madison Avenues.

 

A Legacy at Risk

Azzarone reminds us that fountains used to be critically important. The city’s very first fountain, the Croton Fountain built in 1842 in City Hall Park, commemorated a huge public health achievement—the opening of the Croton Aqueduct, bringing upstate clean water to the city. Previously, cholera killed thousands of New Yorkers, thirty-five hundred in 1832 alone. For years, each new fountain marked and expanded public access to clean water, and was cause for “great celebration, expressed by marching bands, politicians’ speeches, and the assembly of excited crowds.”

She suggests that working fountains are important now—a source of beauty and respite, muffling the city’s noise and moderating the heat, encouraging play and community. Reading her book, it occurred to me that fountains are perhaps the less-favored siblings of statuary, just as craft (think quilts and pottery) gets less respect than “art”—we typically undervalue things that people actively appreciate and put to use.

And then of course, there’s the city’s increasingly ambivalent relationship to once treasured historical edifices. Fountains have engineering that requires maintenance. An underfunded Parks Department can mean fountain “demolition by neglect.”

Azzarone doesn’t mention climate change, but we need our fountains now more than ever. May her wonderful book generate an effusion—a veritable outpouring—of enthusiasm and support for beautiful and working waterworks.