The fountain in better days. Credit

Boston blogger Stephen Baldwin laments the current miserable state of Brewer's Fountain on the Common:

No water flows through the Brewer Fountain this summer. A great shame since the fountain has three beautifully decorated tiers. Around the base are excellently sculpted bronze figures of four Classical figures: Neptune and his wife Amphitrite, and the lovers Acis and Galatea. At the moment they look positively suicidal. And no wonder, they are forced to stare into a bone dry and empty basin that is full of litter and still stinks of last years vagrant's urine. This fountain has not been cleaned in how long?

Far too long, obviously.

I sincerely hope Mr. Brewer is not rolling in his grave, but I'm almost certain he must be. Why donate beautiful things to the city if the authorities will not take care of them? (Via Boston Online)

Worth reading is the article by Catesby Leigh in the recent July 14 edition of National Review entitled, "It Takes a (Well-Planned Village)," on the New Urbanism approach to civic design seen in development projects in Vermillion, N. C. and Glenwood Park in Atlanta. The piece is not online, but here's an excerpt:

The beauty of America's historic landscape settings -- from the rustic informality of loosely built New England hamlets, where houses are intimately wedded to their settings, to the classical pomp of San Francisco's Civic Center and its stupendous City Hall -- conveys, at a very deep level, the idea that the world we inhabit is but the imperfect embodiment of a higher creative intention that man has divined in nature from time immemorial. And conveying that sense of life is the greatest benefit a beautiful community can bestow.

For more in this vein, see the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, whose appreciation of "Diana" I share.