A few days ago, a friend taught me a Spanish idiom: vergüenza ajena. Think of it as an inversion of the German term schadenfreude, that gleeful sense of pleasure in someone else’s pain. The direct translation is “alien embarrassment,” but what it truly conveys is that feeling of mortification when you witness someone do something foolish. Unlike its German counterpart, it brings no joy.
After the initial shock, this was the sense that overcame me as I read about the planned $10 million Las Vegas-style fountain planned as an addition to Klyde Warren Park. It will be named for park board member Nancy Best, and paid for by Best and her husband, Randy Best.
Introduced with a garish rendering and billed as the “world’s tallest interactive fountain,” it would sit at the east end of the park and be capable of spouting jets of water nearly 100 feet in the air, the effects amplified by music and colored lights.
The announcement was described in this newspaper as “unlike anything the world has ever experienced….destined to become a global icon of Dallas and a beacon to downtown.”
An editorial suggested it would be “the most Dallas thing in Dallas. Like big hair and 10-gallon Stetsons, it makes a statement.”
The prospect of such a dramatic alteration to a prized public space warrants more serious justification. Dallasites don’t wear 10-gallon hats anymore — not that they ever did. This is a diverse, modern city desperate for more accessible open space, as the last year of COVID-19 lockdown has vividly demonstrated. It does not need a corny gimmick that propagates an ersatz vision of itself in the interests of Dallas’ self-promotion.
This same misguided thinking characterizes the $76 million expansion plan, announced in December 2018, that would place a multistory, income-generating pavilion at the west end of the park. Its chief tenant: VisitDallas, the embattled civic booster.
These proposals fail in their underestimation of the park’s own success. The best argument and advertisement for Klyde Warren Park, and by extension for Dallas, is the park itself: what it has done to bring Dallas, physically and metaphorically, together. It does not need an inflated, artificial intervention to call attention to itself.
“I do not understand the fascination of creating a seemingly foreign object in a park with elements intended to continually assault the senses,” says the widely respected Dallas landscape architect David Hocker. “I much prefer design that merits accolades like subtle, sublime, meditative, or intimate over biggest, tallest, the most ‘bells and whistles,’ or loudest.”
His voice should bear particular weight, as he is responsible for the design of the Dallas Museum of Art’s recently completed and widely celebrated Eagle Family Plaza, which directly abuts Klyde Warren.
To reject the current fountain proposal is not to dismiss the idea that some type of water feature is appropriate for the east end of the park. According to James Burnett, the landscape architect responsible for the park’s design, that was intended from the outset, but precluded due to cost. “We always planned to mark the Pearl Street gateway on the east side with some type of interactive water feature that would announce and welcome people to the park.”
But Burnett, winner of the prestigious 2020 National Design Award in landscape architecture, was not consulted on the fountain’s design — an almost unfathomable oversight and missed opportunity.
Design instead was left to Jim Garland of the Los Angeles-based fountain specialists Fluidity Design Consultants. Predictably, the fountain designer has designed an enormous fountain, and with every possible feature.
Garland’s work includes the restoration and enhancement of the historic fountains at Longwood Gardens, about 30 miles from Philadelphia. But that project of illuminated dancing fountains is not an applicable precedent for Klyde Warren. The former is a legacy park set on more than a thousand rural acres. Klyde Warren is a 5-acre urban park built over a highway.
Indeed, the theatricality of the fountain proposed for Klyde Warren, perched on the lip of the park’s deck, could also present a deadly distraction to drivers already making a dangerous merge onto the Woodall Rodgers Freeway.
The experience within the park is also troubling, if not potentially injurious. The idea of music — whatever its qualities — being a regular if not constant presence in the park is disturbingly invasive, and a compromise to its status as a calming urban oasis. A water feature would be an attraction to the park, but only if it is scaled appropriately and its emphasis is on play, which is now included but as a comparative afterthought. Its lessons, in a time of climate crisis, should be on the preciousness of water, not wasting it in an unsustainable gusher of civic hubris.
“Kids don’t want a structure to look at or, even worse, a structure in front of which their parents ask them to pose. They want a structure they can climb all over, push and pull, and change to suit whatever game they want to play,” says Alexandra Lange, the author of The Design of Childhood, and an authority on park and playground design.
“Better to spend money on something that will give more kids more pleasure across more of the day — or even on park maintenance, which too many donors forget in favor of splashy displays,” said Lange.
This is specifically a problem at Klyde Warren. The challenge of meeting its large annual maintenance budget was offered as a primary reason for the building of an income-generating pavilion in the park. A fountain will increase those demands.
Taxpayers promised “free” baubles often end up footing the bill in this way. Indeed, the city has put up $10 million in funds to support the pavilion project. If that had been coupled with the $10 million pledged for the new fountain, the park’s maintenance might have been funded in perpetuity. Alas, it’s hard to put your name on maintenance.
And here is where my sense of vergüenza ajena becomes something worse, a kind of deep sadness. Is it really necessary to say that the presentation of such an extravagant folly at a moment when food lines stretch for a mile is inappropriate, not to mention tone deaf? In May, the city furloughed a staggering 235 employees in the Park and Recreation Department, more than 25 percent of its full-time staff.
The justification for moving forward with the fountain is that it is the product of a public-private partnership, and the cost will not be borne by the public partner — at least not initially. But that is dubious reasoning. Public-private partnerships work when both sides of that equation have equal input. Here that process has been short-circuited, with the private partner making decisions for the public partner, and expecting unalloyed gratitude in return. That makes it easy to dismiss critics as unappreciative ingrates. In reality, they just want to be treated as the equal partners that they are, at least in theory.
This is an endemic problem in a culture of civic austerity that is overly reliant on philanthropy. A city has countless underfunded priorities; those that receive private funding are, naturally, the ones that tend to serve the interests of the philanthropic class. And so the city might build a signature opera house — philanthropically funded — only to find out later that taxpayers have to pick up the tab for upkeep. Sound familiar? It should, because the city is paying millions annually to offset costs at the AT&T Performing Arts Center, right next to Klyde Warren Park.
Meanwhile, the Routh Street Gateway project, which would provide safer, improved passage under the Woodall Rodgers Freeway (which Klyde Warren spans) for students from the majority-minority Booker T. Washington High School is not fully funded.
Ultimately, what is so disappointing about this proposal is what it says about Dallas. Klyde Warren Park was the project that told the city — and the world — that it had learned from its past, and that it was embracing a more sensible, sustainable, human-scale urban future.
We should let what happens in Vegas stay in Vegas.
CORRECTION, Dec. 11, 2020: This story was updated to clarify that Nancy and Randy Best, not their foundation, are donating the funds for the Nancy Best Fountain.
CORRECTION, Dec. 12, 2020: This story was updated to reflect that Nancy and Randy Best did not consider Fluidity Design Consultants’ fountains for Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania a model for the firms’ design of the Nancy Best Fountain in Dallas.
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