The Chronicle‘s Rad Sallee reported earlier this week that the frequently broken (but still world class!) Danger Train Main Street Fountain is functional again:
After six weeks and more than $75,000 in repairs, the Main Street Square fountain is again flowing and splashing near car lanes and light rail tracks in the heart of downtown.
The big attraction in a downtown plaza that was supposed to lure lunchtime strollers and commercial development, the fountain has been ridiculed by light rail skeptics, battered by wayward motorists and put to various uses by street people, revelers, pigeons and grackles.
And the bursts of water that were intended to arch gracefully over the passing trains had to be shut off when trains pass because they might interfere with the train drivers’ visibility and leave water spots on the rail cars.
It’s not the fountain’s connection to the light rail trolley that has been ridiculed so much as the utopian notion that somehow a fountain would be a linchpin of a downtown plaza, miraculously “lur[ing] lunchtime strollers and commercial development” (instead of mainly serving as a handy bath for the vagrants who overrun downtown).
Amusingly, Rad Sallee reports today that, in typical fashion, the city didn’t even manage to get the quote right on a sculpture overlooking the fountain:
An office worker strolling on Main Street Square noted the inscription on a sculpture that overlooks the fountain there: “As we build our city, let us think that we are building forever.”
Not to pick nits, the man observed, but shouldn’t it say “building for forever?”
We asked Bob Eury, executive director of the Houston Downtown Management District, which takes care of the fountain. He said the quote is from British author John Ruskin.
The quotation, placed there by artist Michael Davis, comes from a plaque at City Hall that quotes Ruskin in Seven Lamps of Architecture, Eury said.
“Actually, I believe Ruskin’s quote was, ‘Let us think that we build forever,’ ” he said. “But Davis intentionally used the City Hall version.”
Kevin Morrison, a Rice University graduate student, searched through Ruskin’s works and found this: “When we build, let us think that we build for ever.”
Nothing is quite as world-class as getting the quote wrong on the sculpture overlooking the fountain that is being counted on to drive a downtown renaissance. Well done!
BLOGVERSATION: TBIFOC.
