Schubert has his unfinished Symphony No. 8. Lord Byron’s epic “Don Juan” isn’t finished, either.

At first glance, the Alabama-made fountain in Montreal’s Dorchester Square, installed last year, appears to be unfinished, too. But the cast iron fountain is exactly what the designer ordered.

The Berczy Park fountain in Toronto also was designed by Claude Cormier and built by Alabama’s Robinson Iron. The fountain contains 27 dog statues and one cat. (Robinson Iron)

“We’ve done a lot of fountains … and there will probably never be another fountain like it,” said Luke Robinson, sales and marketing director for Robinson Iron, based in Alexander City. “This fountain was not an off-the-shelf fountain. It was built for that space.”

That space is a large square in downtown Montreal, and the fountain is part of an $8.9-million renovation of the popular area. The fountain – with the back cut flat, as if standing against a wall – was conceived by noted designer Claude Cormier to answer a space problem. Roads had to be widened to accommodate tour buses, so the unique fountain design was born.

“Claude said he initially got a negative reaction from the city, but he said whenever he gets a negative reaction initially, he knows he has a great project,” Robinson said. “People are scared of totally unique, sometimes. He knew he was on to something.”

A full-length view of the “unfinished” fountain in Dorchester Square. Note the fanciful woodpecker at work on the fountain’s flat side. (Robinson Iron)

Cormier turned to Robinson Iron to build the fountain because he had already done projects with the 70-year-old Alabama company that specializes in cast metal. Toronto’s Berczy Park fountain, designed by Cormier and built by Robinson Iron, is a steel and aluminum piece that features 27 varieties of dogs and one cat built for the dog park.

“There’s a giant bone at the top that all of the dogs are looking at, and they’re all spouting water into the basin,” Robinson said.

Robinson Iron made all of the pieces in Alex City for the 32-foot-tall Dorchester Square fountain, and two trucks transported them to Montreal, where the fountain was put together.

“It was a tricky thing to get the pieces up there,” Robinson said. “It’s incredibly heavy, all steel and cast iron.”

The fountain is a mix of old and new, Robinson said.

“Montreal is known as the City of Fountains, and this was meant to be a throwback, in a sense, to a Victorian-era fountain,” he said. “Yet the fact that it has the areas sliced off of it are where we modernized a classic piece.”

Another interesting feature? Two custom-built aluminum birds perched on the structure.

“One of them is a woodpecker,” Robinson said. “A woodpecker can be a sculptor when it gets in a tree, and you can imagine this woodpecker as the fountain’s sculptor. You can let your imagination run wild.”

People have loved visiting the new fountain, Robinson said.

“I think the reaction has been great,” he said. “It is definitely a tourist attraction and, a lot of times, that’s what our fountains are meant to be. The flat sides certainly draw a lot of attention.”

This story originally appeared on This is Alabama’s website.