The Villaincourt Fountain's survived an earthquake, a drought, funding issues, and more haters than Nickelback.

Armand Vaillancourt took five years to create his "masterpiece." City residents agree it's named after him, but he always thought of the fountain's name as Québec Libre. So he scribbled that across the structure the night before the grand reveal. When he discovered the next morning that someone had scrubbed away the fountain's nametag, he climbed right up those tubes and, oops!, he did it again.

Bono took a note from Armand the following decade when U2 played a free, quasi-impromptu concert in front of the fountain. The humanitarian gracefully ascended the fountain's right-angle fonts and spray painted 'Rock and roll stops the traffic' on its porous visage. SFPD fined the band and then-mayor Dianne Feinstein said they should jail the bandleader for what we assume was the crime of writing such a lame tag.

After the fountain contracted Bono, things only went downhill. The Loma Prieta earthquake necessitated the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway, resulting in the San Francisco waterfront everyone adores. Only the fountain's entire purpose was lost. With the freeway, it was like a mass of post-apocalyptic concrete vines scaling the highway's side and warning everyone of some weird, dystopian future. Highway removed, and people felt like it was a pile of crap.

For real, the SF Chronicle's architecture critic described the piece as poopies from an odd dog's rectilinear colon. The early 2000s drought forced the city to turn off the water. The city realized the dry spell saved $250,000 off their bottom line in addition to 30,000 gallons of water yearly so, the fountain went cold turkey on H2O.

Then the homeless started finding comfort in the fountain's parched spouts-turned-hovels. Area residents used these human beings as canon fodder in an effort to get the fountain removed. You know, why tackle homelessness as an issue when the problem can be kicked down the road. In 2004, a measure to the city asked that the fountain be dismantled. But, city leaders went another direction. Private funding helped underwrite the fountain getting water again...sometimes. So, everyone loses! The fountain remains dry and useless most of the time, the city outsources its responsibilities to the people, and homelessness is still a problem. Huzzah for San Francisco!