ALL TOGETHER NOW

AT 10, KLYDE WARREN PARK EXPANDS ITS ALL-INCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT WITH A NEW FOUNTAIN FOR SPLASHY GOOD TIMES.

BY LEE CULLUM

It was “as if all the fountains of the English language had been set playing in the sunlight for our pleasure.” In penning this, Virginia Woolf had in mind John Ruskin, like her, a ravishing British writer. She might also have been talking about the Nancy Best Fountain, whose language is color, water, and music. By day or by night, it too is ravishing. Created to liven up the East Lawn of Klyde Warren Park, it has become a park unto itself, complementing the myriad attractions across

Olive Street in the Dallas Arts District, but too spectacular to be ancillary to anything. The Nancy Best Fountain is striking, first of all, because of the elegance of its elements, beginning with the tall, sculptural, stainless steel “trees”—they remind me of Bertoia or Platner— where dancing showers undulate, sometimes with a light touch, flanked on either side by rainy chorus lines of subtlety and grace, and other times more dramatic, soaring on sky-high liquid reds and blues, with songs to match. Such a show of artful flair and technical prowess demands a spirited response. Consequently, everyone dances in the pool, which stretches asymmetrically around the fountain, spouting bubbles of its own everywhere.

Toddlers wade with abandon, moving to the music. So do their parents. So do their dogs. Beyond the merriment, pavers of concrete aggregate, with patterns shifting from one section to another, underscore the perfection of the place, while bright-blue umbrellas above white tables and chairs—plus more chairs in green, yellow, and burnt orange—create an atmosphere of undiluted welcome. Then there’s the donut stand—no flimsy pop-up here. Instead, it’s a round, pristine, sturdy structure with folding windows in front, open to the air for customers to place their orders.

Kit Sawers, president of KWP, attributes the design sense that’s everywhere apparent to her chairman Jody Grant, a da Vinci-like character whose easy understanding of baffling complications allows him to breeze from an underground concrete vault holding 20,000 gallons of water to the unbearable lightness of being up above, where those waters dance and software lights the night. A sound system with 18 speakers brings music to the air, but “aimed inside the park,” he emphasizes, stressing that exacting tests were done. “Tricia Linderman [executive vice president] heard nothing at Museum Tower,” he assures, “and it was pretty loud.” Grant is a banker and at one time a champion swimmer who came to SMU from San Antonio. He has a natural affinity not only for numbers and graphs but also architectural and engineering models. He wears his success so disarmingly that it seems donors give him almost anything he wants. Kelcy Warren did when he agreed to fund a large chunk of the original Klyde Warren Park. So did Nancy Best, an early board member of KWP, when she made possible the fountain that bears her name.

Talking with Nancy Best by phone, I recognize immediately

Nancy Best, Richie Butler, Sheila and Jody Grant. Courtesy of Klyde Warren Park. Dallas Black Dance Theatre’s Sean Smith celebrates the Nancy Best Fountain. Photograph by Tramaine Townsend.

A young boy enjoys the park. Courtesy of Klyde Warren Park.

her command of every piece of the project. Women, I find out, have her to thank for insisting on really nice restrooms, with plenty of space and a changing table for babies. “I learned that in the children’s park,” she points out. When it comes to music, Best wants “something for everybody”— “Texas artists…women soloists, C&W…jazz, classical.” She adds, “You can’t get 10 people to like the same music, [but] I want everyone who comes to the park to feel they can respond to the park.” Best grew up in Ponca City, Okla., went to Oklahoma State University, and then moved to Houston (“Everybody was going to Houston,” she recalls), where she met her husband, Randy, also a funder of the fountain. In time they came to Dallas, which they by then considered “the place to be.” Three words sum up Best’s essential interest in this latest, finest feature at Klyde Warren Park: beauty, nature, and children. They belong together, she believes. That’s what the fountain, in her mind, has been created to accomplish.

“We’re in the entertainment business,” explains Grant, “to bring people downtown.” No one would agree more than his wife, Sheila, a devotee of dance who does not concur with the notion that they also serve who only stand and wait. She was built for action. Indeed, she has gotten over 100 dancers out of Ukraine since the war began. While Jody looks after the structural side of the park, Sheila, also a board member, concerns herself with choreography, marrying “Ring of Fire,” “Dancing Queen,” and “It’s a Wonderful World” to the palette of the fountain. “Music

Klyde Warren Park aerial view. Photograph by Cash Sirois. Courtesy of Klyde Warren Park.

Nancy Best Fountain daytime view. Courtesy of Klyde Warren Park.

Girl power at Klyde Warren Park.

and dance,” she reminds, “have a universal vocabulary.”

“I was not expecting this,” she says of the volumes of energy she has poured into the park. “Dance and books were my life.” Even so, she set out with Jody, doing “homework—footwork [visiting park after park]—learning what works, what doesn’t.” When she started the Fort Worth Ballet, “there were [dance] companies to call,” Sheila recalls. “They knew what to do. Not so with parks.” KWP is “different from the empty green space [of yesteryear]. We don’t want empty park space. [That can be] trouble. [Parks] need to be activated. We want to offer people something they can’t get elsewhere. All for free.”

Parks today “are a brand-new field,” Sheila continues. “No one knows. There is not a special formula yet.” Forming a living park—that is the job of Sawers. Jody Grant does pivotal projects like negotiating a Property Improvement District to give KWP a fair share of the increased taxes paid by neighboring buildings whose values are up thanks to their proximity to this extraordinary collection of pleasurable outings. Sawers must keep those activities going (1,300 of them as of September, maybe more by now) and that means not just managing staff but raising money, since everything in her purview is indeed free to the public, except for the food trucks. She also keeps track of those, however, making sure to maintain a lively mix, including the new donut shop by the fountain.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” she says, echoing Sheila Grant’s readiness to risk the new and the uncharted. No matter what, Sawers is confident that “the park is changing our skyline. It is changing the city.” She would understand that. Like Sheila Grant, Sawers grew up in Dallas and has done many things, all of them well—from running the Tate Lecture Series at SMU to events at the Super Bowl. But it is Klyde Warren Park that has deployed her substantial talents to the fullest.

The same might be said of Linderman, another longtime Dallasite. As the park’s project manager for the fountain as well as executive VP, she keeps this daunting enterprise on track and moving. Previously at EDS and Jody Grant’s Texas Capital Bancshares, she became the indispensable person as construction progressed, working from seven a.m. to ten p.m., day and night

Clockwise from top left: Popsicles at the park; a boy with his dog; Downtown Fever Band; Tree Lighting Ceremony view; Movies in the Park; The Dallas Conservatory performs; View from the Tree Lighting Ceremony. All courtesy of Klyde Warren Park.

by the end, to get it done. Like the Grants and Sawers—Best too—Linderman seems born for this moment. And Jody Grant called the park “the most gratifying thing outside my family I’ve ever done.”

Then there’s the itinerant genius, Jim Garland. His firm, Fluidity Design Consultants, brought the Nancy Best Fountain into being and made it a star. He has moved from Los Angeles to Portland, Ore., where he’s restoring an historic house—but he doesn’t see much of it since he’s always on the road, looking after new creations all over the world, including a recent assignment in Cairo.

Some who meet Garland might take him for a good ol’ boy. A mistake. He has a well-stocked, wide-ranging mind, as I discover when I catch up with him at Logan Airport in Boston, where he’s waiting to fly to LA. We talk by phone for almost an hour. Jim doesn’t just work with water, he reveres it as one of Aristotle’s four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. It is to be celebrated, he feels, “as the Japanese do, with refinement.” The fountain in Dallas, he explains, should be “open to the sky and anchored to the earth,” with the stainless steel trees (he says they could be chalices) not just “a backdrop to churning water.” To him they are sculpture, he says, remembering that in the Renaissance, the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome was designed by Bernini, a great sculptor. The last thing he wants, he says, is for the Nancy Best Fountain to be “a dumb wet deck.” That it definitely is not.

Garland’s plane is ready for boarding, so we wind up with his touching on German philosophy, once again celebrating water, celebrating time, celebrating life. He would have been as pleased as I was a few weeks later to meet a young man stretched out on the greensward near the fountain, reading a book. I ask him to show me the title: Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche, in Spanish. Later I see that he has moved to the sidelines to get away from a soccer game played by little guys and big guys—fathers, and sons perhaps. My reading friend spots me standing on the far side of what is now the field. He waves. I wave back. And so it goes at the Nancy Best Fountain, in this, the tenth anniversary year of Klyde Warren Park. P