Fabulous Fountains of New York

Journalist and native New Yorker Azzarone (Heaven on the Hudson) offers a joyful and informative tribute to the city’s waterworks. In her introduction, Azzarone, who wastes no time making her love of fountains known (“Some say God is the fountain of all being”), traces the lineage of water-conveying architecture from Rome’s aqueducts to Versailles’s gardens to New York’s myriad parks, where fountains function as “a source of serenity, quenching a thirst for quiet” amid the city’s tumult. The 70 fountains Azzarone surveys, when not strictly decorative, are largely intended to honor heroes and famous figures (or, in one case, “hardworking horses”). Among them are a Bowling Green fountain that has been replaced numerous times over the past 180 years but, remarkably, still has the same fence, and the fountain at the center of Columbus Circle, which also happens to be “the point from which official highway distances from the city are measured.” She also spotlights functional fountains like the water troughs (for the city’s aforementioned hardworking horses) that were once prevalent, a few of which still dot Central Park. Each entry is illustrated with an elegant snapshot by photographer Robert F. Rodriguez; a particularly exuberant one depicts kids dancing in the jets of Brooklyn’s Domino Park fountain, which shoot straight out of the sidewalk. The result is an enamoring and enthusiastic ode to one small slice of the Big Apple. Illus. (Sept.)