Fontaine Wallace de couleur verte

A Wallace fountain is a cast-iron structure featuring a dark green finish and a design that has appeared on Parisian streets for over one hundred and fifty years. These fountains originated with Sir Richard Wallace, a British philanthropist living in Paris who responded to the water shortages and high costs that plagued the city’s poorest residents following the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune in the early eighteen-seventies. With public infrastructure in disarray, access to clean drinking water became a crisis, and many people found themselves forced to pay for water or turn to wine as a cheaper alternative.