Recent Grammy Award winner Jon Batiste left The Kessler stage in October 2018, only to reappear in the second-floor gallery playing a melodica. Batiste wound up leading the whole audience onto the West Davis sidewalk for a finale under the marquee.
Kevin Sloan was in the audience that night, and he thought it was just about the coolest thing. He had a video of the performance on his phone.
“He showed it to everyone who came into the office for weeks after that,” co-worker Matt Stubbs says.
Sloan, whose studio is in The Kessler building, remembered that he happened to own a melodica, “and he would bust that out,” Subbs says.
Sloan, a landscape architect who opened his namesake practice in Oak Cliff in 2004, died of glioblastoma, brain cancer, at age 63 in October 2021.
A new park replacing the Jefferson/12th Connector in the Winnetka Heights area will bear his name, Kevin W. Sloan Park.
Sloan and his wife, Diane, moved to Winnetka Heights in 1994.
His most famous project was Vitruvian Park in Addison, which opened in 2010.
“He was the best natural land planner I’ve ever seen,” says Diane, his wife of 35 years. “He would look at the land and let the land tell him where to go.”
She met him in Dallas in 1984, and in 1988 they moved to Syracuse, New Jersey, where he went to grad school, and had a fellowship in Florence, Italy. He started teaching as an assistant professor, and they wound up staying in Syracuse for six years, before returning to Dallas.
Kevin Sloan was also a talented speaker and storyteller, his wife says.
More than anything else, he was a teacher, she says. Not just in school or work settings, but in life.
“It didn’t matter who,” she says. “If there was something in his enormous brain that he wanted you to know, he would teach you whether you wanted to be taught or not.”
Did you know the actor Kevin Bacon’s dad was a famous city planner and architect? Edmund Bacon’s Design of Cities is among the books Kevin Sloan taught as a professor of architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington.
When the Bacon Brothers, a band consisting of Kevin Bacon and his brother, Michael Bacon, performed at The Kessler, MAY 2022 oakcliff.advocatemag.com 21
Kevin Sloan got to tell them what their father’s work meant to him.
“They sat up there for about two hours talking about all kinds of things … architecture, music,” says Jeffrey Liles, the theater’s artistic director.
For the record, anyone who knew Kevin Sloan is one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon.
JEFFERSON/12TH CONNECTOR
When real estate agent Diane Sherman first moved to Oak Cliff in 1977, she and her husband began working with their neighbors on preservation efforts in Winnetka Heights. They helped the neighborhood gain historic district status in 1981.
Removing the Jefferson/12th Connector was among the first causes that the group now known as Heritage Oak Cliff had.
It wasn’t until after Scott Griggs was elected to Dallas City Council in 2010 that neighbors saw their chance to get it done.
The intersection of two high-speed roadways, coupled with the angle of the connector, foments traffic accidents and near-misses.
The City of Dallas removed either 19 or 21 old houses, calculations vary, along South Winnetka and South Clinton sometime in the 1960s, to create the road, as part of its thoroughfare plan. It was meant to move traffic quickly through Oak Cliff from the suburbs to Downtown.
“The city’s priorities have changed, and thank goodness,” Sherman says. “They’re no longer blasting through established neighborhoods to create vehicular traffic greater.”
The $1.6-million project to remove the connector and restore the historic street grid was funded in a 2017 bond issue. It could break ground as soon as August and will take about two years to complete.
Neighbors formed a task force to decide how to use the land, and some wanted to open it up to home builders, Sherman says. But green space won out in the end.
Sherman knew of Kevin Sloan starting in 1982, when he designed the landscape for the law office of her husband, Daniel “Corky” Sherman.
Sloan hadn’t been involved with the neighborhood association, “but I knew he was immensely talented,” Sherman says.
“I got brave and said, ‘Will you help us?’”
KEVIN W. SLOAN PARK
“When you get a chance, take it,” was a leading philosophy of Kevin Sloan’s life.
There are always reasons to say “no” to travel, for example. Who is going to feed the cats?
“You just say, ‘yes,’ and then you figure how to do it,” Diane Sloan says.
The fellowship in Florence led to lifelong friends, overseas teaching opportunities and world travel. The Sloans went to Japan, and they loved England, Ireland and Scotland.
Sloan couldn’t pass up the chance to design a new park in his own neighborhood, and he took on the project with his unique genius.
When neighbors met at Turner House to decide what they wanted for a park, Sloan worked up a system of electronic clickers that counted people’s votes in reaction to his presentation.
“That gave them the data to make decisions,” Stubbs says.
The ultimate plan will create four sections, which are categorized as a park, a tree grove, a formal green and an oval garden, all braided together with plants.
“They’re unique landscapes that are all connected,” Stubbs says. “We had no idea it would one day be named after Kevin.”
The city is paying to remove the roadway, but the park itself is unfunded. Sloan’s friends and family have raised $8,000 so far to pay for it.
Friends and colleagues also raised money to pay for the bed and medical equipment necessary for his end-of-life care at home.
Stubbs visited the Sloans at least twice a week in the nearly two years Kevin Sloan was dying of cancer, because of their office cat, Leo, aka Leonardo da Vinci, who spends his weekends a couple of blocks away at the Sloans’ house.
“From the beginning, Kevin and I were just cushioned with the most incredible support,” Diane Sloan says. “I think he felt very much loved, with calls and letters and visits.”
Stubbs became managing principal of Kevin Sloan Studio when his boss could no longer come to work. Diane Sloan had to stop working then too, but she remains a co-owner of the studio.
“We definitely intend to carry on his work and his legacy,” Stubbs says.
That, above all, is the lasting impression Kevin Sloan left on the world, his wife says.
“He made wonderful spaces that hopefully will be around for 100 years, but his students and colleagues are the ones who are going to carry his work forward,” she says.
