The older girl holds out a hand to do nothing, really, but let a small stream of water fall through her ready palm. She smiles a little, leaning into some iron children emerging from the fountain’s central column. Living boys stalk the perimeter and one more sits gently, tilted leftward, on the curved granite. A younger bather greets the photographer with amusement and her best up-to-no-good stare. It is a lovely late summer morning in 1938. 

At this moment, young bathers are perched at the center of a circular fountain, in the center of Lincoln Park, at the center of the Portland peninsula. You can see that it functions like a kind of sundial. This privileged position offers them quite a lot of scope for action. Insulated from traffic by an iron fence and stone gate, surrounded by grass and trees, they purify themselves and their peers by performing stupendously ancient rituals without hesitation or rehearsal. Adult chaperones chat and read a newspaper. The kids speak to each other and the local freshwater spirits, who speak back to them with reflections and sounds. They participate, as seriously as one can, in the geometry and alchemy of a city.  

Just below their bare feet, which array themselves elegantly along the base of the fountain’s pedestal, we squint at a silvery blaze of sunlight. The atmosphere of the photograph suggests Portland residents in their native habitat; an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary scene.

If these same bathers, who are currently enjoying the assorted pleasures of ripe old age, were to return to Lincoln Park today, they would find the fountain, along with its seclusion, benches, gate and grass just as before, but would find many invisible things quite changed. 

It would be surprising beyond measure if a leisurely dip in the fountain were not illegal by now. Young persons, lulled by air conditioners and screens, would stay put. Parents, fretting over unhoused park dwellers, scarce parking, and fuzzy rules, would redirect to the backyard hose. Municipal agents, protective of a fountain inscribed on the National Register of Historic Places, would bar barefooted climbers. Legal counsel, anticipating lawsuits, would scribble worst case scenarios for the mayor. 

Such a comparison would be harder to appreciate if the Lincoln Park fountain did not still gurgle on, issuing its old invitations through thick and thin until winter flips the switch. What a specimen of delightful and accommodating public sculpture! The municipal fountain being an unmistakable emblem of civic self-esteem and anonymous generosity. Few cities in history have welcomed and worshipped the water like Rome.

During the height of its imperial period, no fewer than five aqueducts fed nine monumental fountains throughout the capitol, along with numerous minor ones. A Roman fountain was, first of all, a kind of celebratory ovation for waters that had traveled hundreds of miles, over every kind of landscape and terrain, before surging into the city cold and clear (due to protected sources, steady flows, and settling tanks to collect silt and debris picked up along the way). 

Secondly, the Roman fountains were built to provide a reliable supply of water for drinking and washing at any hour, in quantities only limited by a capacity to carry. Lastly, these fountains were landmarks intended to impress, convene, and invigorate. Bring your empty containers and wait your turn to the tune of neighborhood gossip. Rome’s large fountains were important architectural and sculptural objects, oases in the urban landscape, tickling five senses. As sculptural commissions, they were sought by the most ambitious and skillful artists of their day. Here Roman citizens could meet, stop, think, speak, ruminate, and splash around.

Let it be noted that as of August 16, 1938, Portland still had its legion of little Romans. With unspoken satisfaction it heard the distant echo of essential water rushing into view far above sea level, water once delivered to the heart of a city with the help of gravity, good math, and sturdy Roman arches. Though by 1938 it was pumping only feebly through a closed and narrow loop, they recognized the thrill of a movement that makes cities possible, responding naturally to its pull.

Let it be further noted that as of October 16, 2025, this echo appears to have faded out altogether somewhere during the intervening years. By which time public art is largely intended to be seen but not heard, nor touched, nor felt, nor leaned into. Immersion in any form is somewhat out of the question, somewhat unhygienic and in bad taste. To use the terms “sculpture” and “pleasure” in the same breath is to sound poetic and a little loopy. If this charming archival image of fountain visitors offers any yardstick, Portland residents have gradually opted for semi-permanent hibernation and an unceremonious, strategic retreat.

It will be objected that Portland is no Rome, that this kind of apples-to-apples comparison is misleading, that I have been picking cherries instead, that time marches on, and that this archival photo is distressingly nostalgic. What Portland has lost in the arena of spontaneous fountain enjoyment, you can hear them saying, is more than recuperated with newer museums, playgrounds, and indoor pools. With respect to 1938, why omit the black and white photos of dim Portland soup kitchens, crowded boarding houses, disenfranchised native Americans, symptoms of the Great Depression, and cars without seatbelts? My reply would be: Exactly.

The world that was clanking and churning around those intrepid kids introduced loads of worries and threats, some near and some far, some woefully apparent and some hidden. The adults on the benches look ever so slightly anxious and distracted. Our kids, too, are surrounded by a clanking and churning — for them, it never stops, it never sleeps, it winks and vibrates to them all the time — and their parents, too, appear a bit battered. It is painful to admit that these strains are timeless, for the time being.  All of it makes an 1866 park with a cast iron fountain appear relevant. The unpretentious circular basin marks a space apart, sheltered, delineated, and off-line. It gushes a glorious lineage. This is not a blank corridor for exercising through, but instead a space for pausing in order to let things move past you. 

It is for feeling once again, if we are able, how close it all might be: each of us to any other, each of us to the necessities of air and sun and water, each of us to the persons we are when we undress from our names and stations to become momentarily distracted. From within this collaborative daydream, public spaces of a certain quality invite us to forget just enough to reach out a cupped hand, for no real reason, and catch the abundance spilling constantly across our bodies, scattering the light.

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Jon Calame teaches art history at the Maine College of Art and Design and the University of Southern Maine. This column is supported by The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation.