This month, Denverites can share their ideas for a public park to be built on the old Park Hill Golf Course in Northeast Park Hill.
The city doesn’t actually own the 155 acres yet, but Parks and Recreation has hired the international planning and design firm Sasaki to lead the planning process for a major new regional park.
Sasaki has been part of projects around the world, including Denargo Market here in Denver.
The city will soon ask you for your ideas.
Neighbors have already been bandying about suggestions for the park: Pickleball. Concerts. A skate park. Community gardens. Golf. Soccer fields.
Sasaki will start the planning process with a community survey to launch on April 21.
On April 24, the city will host a Youth and Family Field Day at the City of Axum Park — near Colorado and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards — from 4:30-6:30 p.m. The event will include brainstorming for the park, plus fun activities like races, basketball, slacklining and climbing.
Northeast Park Hill, where the golf course is located, is a historically Black, working-class neighborhood that lost its grocery stores decades ago and has lacked many of the resources the city has invested in elsewhere.
City Councilmember Shontel Lewis described the creation of the park as “a long overdue investment.”
Sign up for more information about the Park Hill Park planning process here.
It’s been a long road for Park Hill.
The golf course closed back in 2018 and has been sitting empty since. In recent years, open-space advocates and the land’s owner, Westside Investment Partners, wrestled at the ballot box over how the land should be used.
The owners, who wanted a mixed-use development on the land, lost that fight in the 2023 election.
Earlier this year, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston and Parks and Rec head Jolon Clark — who supported developing the land — announced the golf course would become a park.
The pair joined former Mayor Wellington Webb and other open space advocates in their victory celebration, declaring this would be the largest new park in the city in at least 100 years.
At the time of the announcement, the land was still in Westside’s hands. And it still is.
A land swap deal with the land’s owner and the city of Denver has been caught up in a slower-than-expected City Council process.
Still, Johnston anticipates opening the land to the public over the summer.
