A few feet away, a young man was scaling the stone wall as sheets of water tumbled over him, using the stones jutting out as toeholds.
Thrillingly, the Wichita Water Wall seems to exist in some sort of pre-liability world, a throwback to a time when grown-ups were not consumed with taking the fun out of everything because someone might get sued. (All right, or seriously injured.)
The tableau brings to a nostalgic mind the vanished perils of childhood summers past: rope swings over shallow swimming holes, bouncing diving boards at public pools -- once-innocent things now gone the way of toy guns, riding a bike without a helmet and other demonstrable social evils.
Wichita officials are aware that children may risk injury playing in the fountain, not just along the top, but also in the water-slick strip along the bottom that looks like a series of shallow steps.
"Now you know my fears," said Wichita's director of parks and recreation, Doug Kupper. "We have had skinned knees, but we have not been made aware of broken bones. I am knocking on wood as I say that, because they do slip. When they start scaling the wall, though, that makes us nervous."
Small brass signs posted around the fountain are uniformly disregarded. "Preserve our fountain," they say. "No swimming or wading."
As to how the city enforces the ban, Kupper said police officers occasionally advised parents that children should not be in the water, which is chlorinated and filtered, but not at the bacteria-annihilating level of a public pool.
"What's more important: preventing armed robberies or going down and asking kids to get off a fountain?" Kupper asked. "When it's mobbed by 100 kids, one person can't control the circumstances."
Steven Stewart, general manager of the Hyatt Regency, said his staff tries to monitor the fountain, even though it lies on city property. But it's an impossible task.
"People come by the carloads to enjoy it," he said. "They refer to it as 'the water park.' Amazingly, there have been no injuries."
Meanwhile, on the day that Fischer and Ochs stood near the fountain worrying about broken necks, Nikolsha Espinoza, 26, a stay-at-home mom, was watching her children, Lilly, 7, and Jesiah, 9, run around the bottom. She doesn't allow them to play at the top of the fountain.
As for why she brings them here instead of to a city pool, she shrugged.
"It's fun," she said. "And it's free."
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robin.abcarian@latimes.com
