Lotta’s Fountain, San Francisco’s Oldest Monument, Turns 150

San Francisco is such a relatively new city — especially given how much was destroyed and rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake and fire — that it rarely gets to celebrate actually old things (except for Methuselah, its always-celebrated 100-year-old lungfish).

Come Tuesday, Sept. 9, we will have arrived at the 150th anniversary of Lotta’s Fountain, the city’s oldest monument, at the intersection of Kearny, Geary and Market Streets. The 18-foot-tall cast-iron fountain was an 1875 gift to the city from the performer Lotta Crabtree, a homegrown talent and once one of the most famous actresses in the United States.

These days, the fountain doesn’t function as a watering hole. But back in 1875, SF Heritage President and CEO Woody LaBounty explains, it was far more than a decorative object. “It was a fountain that provided essentially free and — we hope — clean drinking water to people at a time when that wasn’t a guarantee in a big city,” he says.

An 1875 item in the San Francisco Chronicle stated, “The gift is a graceful one, and will be properly appreciated in the neighborhood where it is to be placed.”

Wealthy figures gifted tributes to a city or tried to memorialize their own fame all the time, LaBounty says, but rarely did those gifts serve as a public utility. “We call it Lotta’s Fountain, but she didn’t call it that,” LaBounty adds. This was a generous, ego-less gift.

Born in New York in 1847, Lotta and her mother joined her father in Grass Valley in 1853, where she was “discovered” by the notorious dancer Lola Montez. Lotta honed her talent by dancing, singing and playing the banjo at gold and silver mining camps, and by 1856 her family had moved to San Francisco. The tiny performer became known as “Miss Lotta, the San Francisco Favorite.”

Her reputation only grew from there; at 20, she was nationally known. Lotta’s life was breathlessly covered by local and national newspapers, including an 1883 mention in the San Francisco Examiner of her head’s circumference (an unremarkable 22 inches). She never married — another source of rumors and reporting — and in the 1880s was the highest-paid actress in America.

Back in San Francisco, Lotta’s Fountain became a gathering place, and later, a symbol of hope after the 1906 earthquake and fire. “All the familiar spots and sites and gathering places in San Francisco were almost completely lost,” LaBounty explains. “But right in basically the core, the busiest part of the city … the fountain survived and it looked essentially the same.”

Every year, people gather at Lotta’s Fountain on April 18 at 5:12 a.m. to commemorate the disaster.

Over the past 150 years, Lotta’s Fountain has been subject to several slight moves and restorations, usually when the city has undertaken a major makeover of Market Street. (From 1916 to 1999, the fountain had an ungainly eight-foot-tall addition to raise its overall height to that of Market Street’s street lamps.) In preparation for the fountain’s sesquicentennial, repairs were undertaken by ARG Conservation Services in 2024.

Lotta retired in 1891, in her mid-40s and fabulously wealthy. Though she lived the rest of her life on the East Coast, she returned to San Francisco in 1915 for Lotta Crabtree Day at the Panama Pacific International Exhibition, still beloved by her adopted hometown. She died in 1924 in Boston at the age of 76.

On Tuesday, SF Heritage will host a free online history presentation to mark the fountain’s 150 years. The city is planning an in-person event for December, closer to the anniversary of opera singer Luisa Tetrazzini’s 1910 Christmas Eve concert at Lotta’s Fountain, an event attended by a crowd of over 250,000.

For his part, LaBounty wants passersby to see the monument as a tangible connection to the past.

“Lotta’s Fountain connects somebody who just got here yesterday with people who were here in 1875,” he says. “I think at the very least just touch it as you walk by. Give it a little pat, because it’s pretty much the longest-lasting and most visible symbol that we have in San Francisco.”