Ugliest Statue in Washington, D.C.

The Temperance Fountain is a fountain and statue located in Washington D.C., donated to the city in 1882 by Henry D. Cogswell, a dentist from San Francisco, California, who was a crusader in the temperance movement.  This fountain was one of a series of temperance fountains he designed and commissioned in a belief that easy access to cool drinking water would keep people from consuming alcoholic beverages.

                                            The hideous Temperance Fountain and Statue

Design

 The fountain has four stone columns supporting a canopy on whose sides the words "Faith," "Hope," "Charity," and "Temperance" are chiseled. Atop this canopy is a life-sized heron, and the centerpiece is a pair of entwined heraldic scaly dolphins. Originally, visitors were supposed to freely drink ice water flowing from the dolphins' snouts with a brass cup attached to the fountain and the overflow was collected by a trough for horses, but the city tired of having to replenish the ice in a reservoir underneath the base and disconnected the supply pipes. 

The inscription reads:
(Base of fish:)
PRESENTED BY
DR. HENRY D. COGSWELL
OF SAN FRANCISCO CAL
(Top of temple:)
TEMPERANCE
FAITH
HOPE
CHARITY

Location

In 1987, it was relocated about 100 feet north [backing it away from Seventh and Pennsylvania Avenue to approximately Seventh and Indiana Avenue] during the renewal by the Pennsylvania Avenue Development Corporation, since the statue was regarded as undesirable from the start.  The PADC created Indiana Plaza, and the Temperance Fountain swapped locations with the monument to the Grand Army of the Republic, which was considered historically more significant.

Today the fountain sits at the corner of Seventh Street and Indiana Avenue, NW, across from [701 Pennsylvania Avenue, a METRO subway entrance and] the National Archives and Navy Memorial, where thousands of tourists and workers walk past daily without noticing it.  The Temperance Fountain has been called "the city's ugliest statue" [in writing by the Washington Post in 2003]. The late NBC correspondent Bryson Rash, writing in Footnote Washington, a 1981 book of capital lore, reported that "these unusual and awkward structures spurred the movement across the country for city fine arts commissions to screen such gifts" prior to funding.  In April 1945, Sen. Sheridan Downey of California introduced a Senate resolution to remove the fountain, but, preoccupied with World War II, Congress ignored the resolution and it died in committee.^[

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_Fountain_(Washington,_D.C.)