H E A RT I N T H E PA R K
Landscape architect Kevin W. Sloan’s legacy to live in the greenspace designed Story and by RACHEL STONE
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,
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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, Kevin Sloan got to tell them what their father’s work meant to him.
