DIY Drinking Fountain

 Have you ever thought to yourself, "I sure wish there were more drinking fountains in my neighborhood"? Well, for about $100, you can build your very own drinking fountain in one afternoon, and be a drinking fountain champion! 

Supply List:
- Existing outdoor hose bib

   - Stainless steel drinking fountain faucet with 1/2" inlet
- One 1/2” steel pipe, 36” long
- One 1/2” elbow pipe piece
- One hose adapter
- One RV food-grade hose (however long you need to reach the nearest hose bib  mine is 25' long)
- Brackets
- Plumber’s tape
- One stainless steel dog bowl
- Something to attach it to

Click here for full instructions and links to all the products you'll need for this project. If you make one, be sure to let us know so we can send you a little Neighborhood Drinking Fountain plaque!

I bought this drinking fountain faucet on Amazon for about $40.

Order a drinking fountain spigot online, or find one at a local salvage center. Once you purchase your drinking fountain spigot, take it to your favorite hardware store as you shop for the other pieces to make sure they all fit together. Use the plumber's tape on all joints to prevent leakage, and run the RV hose to your hose bib. 

I used two brackets to attach my pipe to an old maple stump, which both secures the fountain and provides a step stool for little feet. The dog bowl, positioned at the bottom of the drinking fountain's arc, catches the water and provides a lovely amenity for neighborhood dogs. (Several of my neighbors have told me that their dogs pull across the street every day to drink from my fountain!)

And here's the finished product!

The Catholic Total Abstinence Fountain

PHILADELPHIA, PA

Temperance goals were one of the main drivers of drinking fountain donations in late-nineteenth century America. One of the grandest examples is the Catholic Total Abstinence Fountain in Philadelphia.

In 1869, Dr. Wilson Cary Swann started the Philadelphia Fountain Society. “Believing that lack of water for workers and animals led to intemperance and crime, the society provided fountains and watering troughs throughout the city and park so that workers could quench their thirst in public instead of entering local taverns.”^[1] The Catholic Abstinence Union gave a huge fountain in Philadelphia, the Catholic Total Abstinence Fountain: “it was thought by the Abstinence Union that a fountain of water surrounded by statues of prominent Irish Catholic Revolutionary Heroes would be a lasting memorial to the principles of the anti-alcohol movement and of the patriotism of the Irish in America.”^[2] Other information about Dr. Swann seems to be lost to history, though – the Philadelphia Historical Society has no information on him or his fountain.The fountain is a massive stone number, a huge basin with five stone saints rising out of it, each with spigots to drink from.

I went to check out the Catholic Total Abstinence Fountain on a recent trip to Philadelphia. It’s in Fairmount Park, a 2,000-acre park a few miles upriver from downtown, with attractions like a Japanese Garden, an arboretum, and Boathouse Row, which appears in every collection of scenic postcards from Philadelphia. But the Catholic Abstinence Fountain isn’t near any of these attractions. I hiked across vast, empty, overgrown fields, parched and thirsty, and finally came upon the former fountain. It’s now the center of a traffic circle. A twenty-foot wide, sidewalk-less road ran around it, and as the summer sun beat down on me, there was no water in sight. Grass sprouted out of cracks in the stone, and the basins were bone dry. An empty Crystal Geyser water bottle sat abandoned next to one of the spigots. I could see where gushing fountains used to surround Moses, where a huge central basin would have been filled with water and reflected the sky. Down the road, several cars had gathered to tailgate before a nearby concert, and a couple of the concertgoers wandered around the fountain. One of them chatted on the phone and sipped bottled water. A young couple took long drafts from their beer cans and wandered aimlessly around the dry fountain. I think it’s safe to say that Dr. Wilson Cary Swann would have been disappointed. An Uber rescued me.

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^[1]  Jim McClelland, Fountains of Philadelphia (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2005), 6.

^[2]  Jim McClelland, Fountains of Philadelphia (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2005), 16.

 

Lotta's Fountain

SAN FRANCISCO

Thousands of residents and tourists pass a gold-painted decorated column perched on a traffic island at San Francisco’s intersection of Market Street and Kearney every day. It looks completely boring. And judging by the empty water bottles and banana peels stuffed in its bowls, a lot of people think it’s a fancy trash can. Once in a while, a tourist will take a picture of it with a nice view down Market Street, the famous Ferry Building just visible in the background at the end of the street. But San Francisco’s oldest monument, Lotta’s Fountain, has water pipes running inside and a great history.

 

Charlotte “Lotta” Crabtree started her career dancing on barrel tops and playing her banjo in San Francisco as a teenager during the gold rush. She became wildly famous there, and went on to have a career as a comedian and actress on Vaudeville and other national stages. Crowds, apparently overcome with joy at her performances, threw gold nuggets, coins, and even, once, a $400 gold watch on stage for her. “California’s Diamond” was the most beloved entertainer in the country, the Lucille Ball of her day. She also became the wealthiest, amassing a fortune during her career: those gold nuggets really add up. And though she eventually retired in Boston, she always loved San Francisco, the city upon whose barrel tops she she got her start.

 

In 1875, after she had retired, Lotta decided to donate a cast iron fountain to San Francisco as a token of friendship. Manufactured on the East Cost (a sure sign of quality in those days), the fountain cost $8,475: $185,000 in today’s dollars. (The average drinking fountain today costs about $3,000. Lotta’s drinking fountain spared no expense.) It was twenty-four feet tall with Griffith-head spouts at drinking height on all four sides. Above the drinking base, a column extended upwards and the whole thing was topped with a lantern, reflecting the fact that both public drinking water and streetlights were rare public goods in that era. On the side, a huge engraving reads, “From Lotta.” (The engraving takes it for granted that everyone will always know Lotta’s name.)

 

The city held a huge opening ceremony for the fountain on September 9, 1875. The Mayor and city elites showed up, and the streets were packed with thousands of spectators. Lotta’s aunt attended as her representative, taking the first ceremonial sip from the shiny new fountain. (The ceremony echoed earlier English drinking fountain ceremonies: having a high-status woman take the first drink demonstrates the fountain’s safety and  intended use across class lines.) But when the crowd (mostly “idle men from the street”) saw what liquid the fountain was dispensing, mayhem ensued. These idle men were apparently unacquainted with the idea of a drinking fountain, and the fact that they were supposed to drink plain water from it – not something better like beer or gin. All this pomp and circumstance for a fountain with plain old water? Police were summoned to quell the riot. Women and children were shuttled to safety.

 

But once everyone got used to the idea of a fancy fountain dispensing water, the fountain was a success. This drinking fountain wasn’t shoved off in the corner to the side of better attractions – it was the attraction. Lotta’s fountain began to serve as a major city landmark for early San Francisco. Sited right on Market Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, it was in the city’s prime real estate, useful to thousands of people each day. Functionally, it dispensed water and light, and aesthetically, it gave San Francisco, a city that has always tried to compete with the greater cities in the East, a bit of cultural polish. Everyone knows that great cities have monuments – and Lotta’s fountain was San Francisco’s first.

 

Soon enough, the monument gained an added importance: in San Francisco’s massive 1906 earthquake, as most of the city was reduced to rubble and flame, Lotta’s fountain survived unharmed. The twenty-four foot fountain stood alone on market street, surrounded by chaos on all sides – and it continued to dispense water. In the earthquake’s aftermath, the fountain emerged as the symbol of resilience. Every year afterwards, on the earthquake’s April anniversary, earthquake survivors would gather there to lay wreaths at Lotta’s fountain in memory of those who died. Even 110 years later, with no survivors left, the earthquake remembrance continues at Lotta’s fountain as a way to raise awareness for earthquake preparedness.

 

But Lotta’s Fountain didn’t just sit there unchanged. Looking at historic photos of it in the San Francisco Public Library’s collection is kind of a crazy adventure: every few years, the fountain is different, as though you’re seeing a series of Lotta’s fountains from parallel universes. Drinking cups appear and disappear, separate drinking spigots materialize and vanish, lamps come and go. The most startling change happened in 1916, when the column suddenly grew by eight feet and stayed that way until 1999, when it shrunk back. This was quite confusing to me when I first started looking at the photos. How does a cast iron drinking fountain grow and shrink over time? Digging through newspaper records, I learned that when the city finally constructed the first line of street lights along Market Street, city officials increased the height of the fountain by eight feet so that its top lantern would align with the other street lights. It went from a short column to a towering column. It stayed in its altered state until the historic preservationists got their hands on it and cut it back down to the original size. At the same time, these preservationists removed the drinking fountain spigots with on/off handles that showed up sometime between 1940 and 1964, which had, in turn, replaced the tin drinking cups chained to the fountain, part of the original design and typical of early drinking fountains.

 

The water itself, harder to see from the photos, has also had a tumultuous history. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on the exciting ceremonies when water when restored to the fountain, but not when on when it fell into disrepair. In 1962, the papers reported that the fountain was renovated and drinking water restored. In 1974, the papers reported again that the water had been restored (and that the fountain was moved a few feet to the southeast to accommodate increasing traffic). Accompanying the celebratory article was a photo showing Mayor Diane Feinstein (now a California senator) taking one of the first drinks – strangely, from a glass beer stein, with the fountain completely out of view.

 

Then, the fountain essentially disappears from the public record until the late 1990s, when Lotta’s Fountain was appropriated by the arts council. A 1998 San Francisco Chronicle article mentions in passing how the water had been shut off in 1975 due to a drought – only one year after the Mayor had celebrated its water being turned back on![2] The 1999 restoration, which reduced the height and removed the tacked-on drinking spigots, half-heartedly restored the water: for so-called special occasions only.

 

 “‘It will not be a drinking fountain,’ said Debra Lehane, of the San Francisco Arts Commission which owns the fountain. The explanation is typical of modern times. ‘It would have to conform to the health code,’ she said, ‘And that is too complicated.’”[3]

 

The Arts Commission apparently believed that the only important thing about Lotta’s Fountain, the sole detail worth saving, was its original sculptural design. In actuality, providing fresh water and light were far more revolutionary ideas than the fountain’s fairly bland cast-iron design.

 

Today, the fountain is dry, and just looks like any other city monument. The drinking cups and drinking spigots, and all signs that anyone has ever been able to quench their thirst at this site, are long gone, and, as the author of Fountains of San Francisco balefully notes, “its function has been denigrated to that of a sometimes refuse bin, an occasional meeting place, and as an interesting monument along a busy downtown street.”^[4] CVS and Walgreens stores flank the leftover shell, selling abundant bottled water to the hordes of thirsty tourists. After drinking their expensive water, many of these tourists will toss their empty plastic bottles into Lotta’s basins that used to fill with fresh, free water.

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[2] Carl Nolte, “Lotta’s Legacy Lives,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, April 15, 1998).

[3] Carl Nolte, “Lotta’s Legacy Lives,” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, April 15, 1998).

^[4]  Bernard S. Katz, The Fountains of San Francisco (San Francisco: Don’t Call It Frisco Press, 1989), 12-14.

Dracena Quarry Park sand play fountain

PIEDMONT, CA

I've written before about how health department requirements to attach drinking fountains to sanitary sewer lines adds unnecessary cost and water waste to a drinking fountain. At this lovely park in Piedmont, California, though,  the water drains right into the sand play area, making drainage water a fabulous ingredient in play:

The water bubbles happily down a line of boulders. And everyone knows that wet sand is way more fun than dry sand! This double-duty fountain saved money, enhances play, and likely keeps all the playing kids well-hydrated!

MIT Drinking Fountain Thesis Link

Last spring, I graduated from MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning with a master's in City Planning. The subject of my master's thesis was, of course, drinking fountains, and their past and future as elements of public space. You can read it here:
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/99098

It was also featured on my department's homepage, spreading the drinking fountain love.

Fresh Pond "Water for All" Fountain

CAMBRIDGE, MA

One of my favorite drinking fountains is along the walking path at Cambridge, MA's Fresh Pond. Fresh Pond is the water source for the city, and two decorative drinking fountains were commissioned by the Cambridge Arts Council and completed in 2013. These fountains draw attention to the quality of the water source and the intersection of good water with preserved open land.

What I love about this one, designed by artist Laura Baring-Gould, is that it takes a factory-standard drinking fountain as a starting point, and simply caps it with a spectacular bronze bowl. 

Instead of reinventing the wheel, the artist just takes a classic drinking fountain and turns it into something out of the ordinary. Titled, "Water for All," little inhabitants of the pond adorn the bronze cap. This is a great example of how to create special drinking fountains without huge budgets and too much fuss. Artists could be commissioned to do something like this with any existing drinking fountain.

Fire Hydrant Fountains

VIENNA

Traveling in Vienna last month, I saw drinking fountains all over the city. Some of the most interesting ones were attached right on top of fire hydrants. I couldn't tell whether the drinking fountains were added recently to existing fire hydrants, or if the whole fire hydrant had just been built like that. Bowls beneath invited urban dogs to take a drink, too.