This made me chuckle:
In San Francisco magazine, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Allan Temko nearly ran out of adjectives when he harrumphed that the [Vaillancourt] fountain was “incredibly ugly, brutal, pretentiously simple-minded and literally insipid concrete blocks” that resembled excrement “deposited by a giant concrete dog with square intestines.”
I’m not sure how I feel about the possibility that the Vaillancourt fountain may be taken down. It has always been a bit of an eyesore, but it’s also one of my first memories of San Francisco, from back when the backdrop of the Embarcadero Freeway made it look more pleasing than it was—and it was actually fun to walk on.