On the Embarcadero, sometime before the last Tuesday of May, the final concrete sections of the Justin Herman Plaza fountain were loaded onto a flatbed and driven away. A Reddit user caught the tail end of it — the last of the Vaillancourt Fountain, as it's formally known, leaving the plaza it had occupied since 1971, when sculptor Armand Vaillancourt bolted together 101 precast concrete tubes into something that has spent its entire existence provoking arguments about whether it was art, an eyesore, or both.

What happens to the pieces is genuinely unclear. One commenter on the thread claimed to know the storage location and declined to share it, citing concern about a potential rescue operation — a piece of information delivered with enough smug confidence to suggest they either actually know or very much want you to think they do. Another commenter offered a starker account: the sections were headed to a landfill, not storage. Whether that's accurate isn't confirmed, but the fountain is gone from the plaza regardless of where it landed.

The structure had been out of service for years, drained and fenced off through various rounds of plaza redesign planning. Its removal is part of a broader renovation of Justin Herman Plaza — which is also being renamed — that the Port of San Francisco and the city have been pushing through in phases. The fountain's operating costs, its maintenance demands, and the redesign's pedestrian and open-space priorities all pointed toward the same conclusion.

Vaillancourt himself had chained himself to the fountain in protest at one point, years back, and a 1991 U2 concert famously left Bono's spray-painted graffiti on its surface — facts that circulate every time the structure comes up, as they did again in the thread. The comment section drifted between genuine curiosity about the pieces' fate, a quote from a rock lyric, and a flat joke about landfill fires.

Someone walking past the plaza now would find an open concrete apron where the fountain stood, the surrounding redesign work still in progress, and a view toward the Ferry Building that, for the first time in five decades, doesn't have 101 concrete tubes in the middle of it.