Mayor's splashy goal: working fountains

Paris has the sparkling Trocadero Gardens. In Rome, the great sea god Triton blows cascades through his conch shell into rippling pools below. Boston, by contrast, has never been much on fountains. Across the city there are a grand total of 23, and many of those haven't worked for years, while Kansas City has 160, for example.

But with a few months to go until out-of-town guests arrive for the Democratic National Convention, Mayor Thomas M. Menino says he wants the city's fountains spouting again.

"I'm a nut for fountains,'' he said in a recent interview. "It's part of the beautification of the city.''

The mayor says he has been trying to get the city's fountains flowing since the day he took office and that his recent efforts have nothing to do with the convention.

But he is attacking the situation with renewed vigor. This week city workers are checking pipes, fixing leaks, and turning on any fountains they can make work. They're to report back to the mayor on their progress.

Unfortunately, many of the fountains are more than 100 years old, and city officials say that severe New England temperatures have taken a toll. Parks officials say it's uncertain every spring whether the fountains have survived. Some haven't worked in decades.

The pipes at Brewer Fountain, which once shot plumes of water into a pool on the Common, have frozen and thawed so many times they leak profusely. The city and a charitable group raised money in 2001 to try to fix the Brewer, a copy of a French fountain that was installed in 1868, but when workers unearthed the pipes, they realized the damage was so extensive they would need another $100,000 to repair them.

"If these fountains were down south, they would probably be able to last for another 100 years," said Mary Hines, spokeswoman for the Boston Parks and Recreation Department.

At the Public Garden, officials say little can be done for the Ether Monument, whose motor failed more than a decade ago.

"It has to be completely upgraded," Hines said. "The motor went kaput, and the bronze needs refurbishing."

Still, the city is searching for ways to make all the city's fountains work, she said.

Perhaps the city's most troublesome fountain is the one in City Hall Plaza. That fountain has been a problem since its inauguration in 1969, when the filtration system failed and it spewed green and brown foam that one observer likened to pea soup. It suffered problems again a couple of years later, when one of it's three 90-horsepower motors broke down. Similar difficulties continued to vex city plumbers, and they eventually gave up. After it was shut down for good in 1977 because water was leaking into the subway tunnel below, other schemes for the depressed fountain basin have abounded. The most novel, perhaps, belongs to Menino, the self-styled "urban mechanic," whose administration once tried to "stick a sprinkler under it" so the fountain appeared to work.

"We jiggered it up," Menino recalled. "We put a hose under there and put some plants around, but it leaked through. We just couldn't jerry-rig it at all."

In 1994, Menino ordered soil brought in and directed the Parks Department to transform the fountain into a garden of petunias and marigolds, palm and maple trees. City workers nicknamed the project "Menino Park."

But that leaked into the subway, too, and the planter idea was abandoned after only a few years. Now, the fountain remains a chipped basin, where small pools of brackish rain water sometimes collect.

Menino says he has loved fountains since his childhood in Hyde Park, when he and friends played in a spray pool behind the municipal building. As an adult, when he saw the famed Trevi in Rome and a Venice fountain, whose name he can't recall, he decided that fountains are measures of cities' greatness.

"That's why when I see a fountain that doesn't work, I always try to get the appropriate agency to fix it immediately, if it can," he said.

The mayor's favorite fountain -- though he said he hates to pick just one, insisting "they're all different, they're all unique" -- is the fountain at Post Office Square. Like any good fountain, he said, it shows the "liveliness of that spot in the city."

Menino says he's determined to get the city's fountains running again, though he is careful to add that the city is strapped for cash and that his effort won't include expensive overhauls. Instead, Hines said, some will have to have "temporary solutions."

"We're stretching money as much as we can," she said.

To make all Boston's fountains work like new and stay that way, parks officials say they would need "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to repair damaged pipes and convert those that still rely on continuous water supplies into recirculating fountains. The department would also probably have to hire more plumbers; three currently must squeeze in fountain work between repairs on sprinkler systems, restrooms, and water bubblers at ball fields.

Yesterday, city plumbers stopped at Blackstone Square in the South End to turn on the water at a fountain there to check for leaks. They shut the water off a short time later.

A mother and child strolled through the square, stopping briefly among the pigeon flocks to look at the majestic black sculpture.

"It's relaxing," said Bonita Cuff, who lives a few doors away with 4-year-old Janaya. "When they have the fountain on, that is."

Donovan Slack can be reached at dslack@globe.com.