Someone keeps dumping soap in the Waterfront Park fountain outside the Seattle ferry terminal. It’s turning the water all sudsy and making a mess of things.  The fountain was created by Japanese-American artist George Tsutakawa and named after Joshua S. Green, Sr., a Seattle philanthropist an d one-time champion of the Mosquito Fleet. Like all of Tsutakawa’s fountain sculptures, this one attempts “to unify water—the life force of the universe that flows in an elusive cyclical course throughout eternity—with an immutable metal sculpture,” he says. Well, someone is messing up that recipe for unity by adding soap into the mix.  The Joshua S. Green, Sr., Fountain was originally installed at Colman Dock in 1966. It  lived there until around 2022, when it was removed during construction on Seattle’s waterfront redesign. It was reinstalled near its original home and now lives on the waterfront on Columbia Street. Since its return to the waterfront, the fountain has been “soaped” 16 times. Or, at least, 16 times that have been recorded, according to Tiffani Melake, an operations manager with the Seattle Center Waterfront Park operations team. On one occasion in early fall, the culprits used tide pods, Melake wrote in an email. The rest of the soapings used dish soap.   “We have drained the fountain a total of four times since the fall due to soap instances,” Melake explains. “It gets temporarily shut down as we pressure wash it and refill it back up, but that is a minimal time frame of less than 6 hours.”  Either we’re stuck with a drained fountain, which is just a sculpture, or we’re stuck with a frothy, rabid-looking water feature.  “As the soaping has continued, we have not drained it after each instance,” Melake said. So, it remains soapy. A defoamer they use helps tone down the foam, “but due to the amount of soap being put in the fountain, it doesn’t eliminate it.” The Seattle Center Waterfront operations team has not called the police over the soaping. They do not have any suspects. It could be anyone. “It has been a recent Tik-Tok trend,” Melake says. This cannot be the future Tsutakawa envisioned for his fountain.  The post Stop Putting Soap in the Waterfront Park Fountain appeared first on The Stranger. ...read more read less