We Don’t Trust Drinking Fountains Anymore; That’s Bad for Our Health

"One sultry day in 2012 , a handful of New Yorkers laid out a rich red carpet in Union Square Park. As a jazz band grooved in the background, vested and begloved hosts led guests to the star attraction: a drinking fountain. The event, called “Respect the Fountain,” was staged by a group with an unlikely mission — to make water fountains cool again.

Fountains were once a revered feature of urban life, a celebration of the tremendous technological and political capital it takes to provide clean drinking water to a community. Today, they’re in crisis. Though no one tracks the number of public fountains nationally, researchers say they’re fading from America’s parks, schools and stadiums. 'Water fountains have been disappearing from public spaces throughout the country over the last few decades,' lamented Nancy Stoner, an administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency’s water office. Water scholar Peter Gleick writes that they’ve become 'an anachronism, or even a liability.' Jim Salzman, author of 'Drinking Water: A History,' says they’re 'going the way of pay phones.'

Even the International Plumbing Code, followed by builders in most American cities, has signaled that the fountain is out of style. In the 2015 edition of the manual, which lays out recommendations on matters such as the number of bathrooms an office should have and how pipes should work, authors slashed the number of required fountains for each building by half."

Kendra Pierre-Louis reports in the opinion section of the Washington Post July 8, 2015.