Established in 1882, City Park is Denver’s largest urban park, occupying nearly 320 acres between East Seventeenth and East Twenty-Third Avenues from York Street to Colorado Boulevard. Designed primarily by civil engineers Henry Meryweather and Walter Graves in the 1880s and by Reinhard Schuetze in the 1890s and early 1900s, the park is known for its lakes, large fields, and scenic views of downtown Denver and the Front Range. It has always featured a variety of uses in its northern half, including a racetrack (now turned into playing fields), tennis courts, maintenance buildings, the Denver Zoo, and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Denver’s extensive park and parkway system began in 1868 with the establishment of Curtis Park. Over the next decade, civic leaders such as Mayor Richard Sopris, Henry Lee, and Jacob Downing advanced the idea that the city should have two major parks— one to the east and one to the north—connected by a grand tree-lined boulevard. The only thing that came of the plan was the city’s 1882 acquisition of the rectangular plot that became City Park.
Civil engineers Henry Meryweather and Walter Graves laid out the first design for the park. Their plan followed the tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s design for Central Park in New York City and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, with looping carriageways and walking lanes, a lake, and a preference for picturesque vistas across meadows or water. There were no systematic plantings, so the park remained a grassy plain east of the city. Over the next decade, Denver schoolchildren helped bring shade to the park by planting trees each Arbor Day. By 1890, the park had about 600 shade trees.
When it was established, City Park lay beyond developments on Denver’s eastern edge. Visiting the park became much easier for residents when the Denver Tramway Company and the Denver City Cable Railway built lines to the park in the late 1880s. In 1890 the streetcar companies encouraged visitation by staging a series of free concerts at the park.
In 1893 Reinhard Schuetze became the city’s first landscape architect. Over the next decade he carried out a series of changes on the existing design of City Park. The most important change was the addition of Big Lake in 1896–97, complete with an island, a promenade along the shore, and a pavilion and bandstand. Now called Ferril Lake (after local poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril), the large lake quickly became the park’s central feature, providing an important landmark as well as striking vistas of the mountains. A colored electric fountain was installed in 1908 and became an enduring attraction. The lake was also practical, serving as the park’s irrigation reservoir and an emergency water source for the city.
In addition to Ferril Lake, Schuetze’s other major contribution to City Park was his design for the Esplanade, which he planned in 1905–6 and began planting in 1907. A grand entryway with a classic French design that stretches two blocks south to East Colfax Avenue, the Esplanade provides a bridge between the park and the city. At Colfax, a semicircular road and the Sullivan Memorial Gateway (1917) frame the Esplanade’s entrance. From there, the Esplanade leads to a large rondel in the park’s southwestern corner, which features the Thatcher Memorial Fountain (1918) at its center. A gift of banker Joseph Addison Thatcher, the fountain includes an eighteen-foot bronze statue of a woman who represents the State of Colorado surrounded by smaller bronze figures that stand for love, learning, and loyalty.
By the time Charles M. Robinson arrived in Denver in 1906 to prepare a comprehensive plan for the city’s parks and parkways, City Park had become what Robinson called the “people’s park,” a popular place for recreation and relaxation with a mix of passive and active uses. In addition to its open spaces and public facilities, City Park also served as the headquarters for Robinson’s planned system of parks and parkways. The park’s northern boundary was home to greenhouses, barns, toolsheds, and shops that kept the city’s other open spaces green and lush.
City Park’s two major institutions took shape in the early 1900s. With an eagle and a bear, the Denver Zoo got its start in 1896 on the north side of the park. The zoo’s most famous feature, Bear Mountain, was installed in 1918, when it was still possible to pass freely between the park and the zoo. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, the zoo expanded from forty to seventy acres and was fenced off from the rest of City Park. Since then, there have been occasional tensions between park and zoo, mostly over finding the proper balance between the bustle of the growing zoo and the tranquility of the park’s open spaces.
Meanwhile, in 1908 the Colorado Museum of Natural History (now the Denver Museum of Nature & Science) opened on a high point along the park’s eastern edge. The museum formed in 1900, after the naturalist Edwin Carter sold his large collection of specimens and artifacts to Denver, and its site was chosen in 1901. Originally, the museum was built in the style of a small Greek temple, creating a picturesque view from the lake below. But additions over the twentieth century have turned the small temple into a sprawling complex. The museum’s view west to the mountains is now protected by a municipal ordinance.
In addition to the fencing of the Denver Zoo in 1956, several other important changes occurred in City Park in the 1950s. The racetrack in the park’s northeast corner, which had opened for harness racing in 1892, was removed in 1950 and replaced with playing fields. In the park’s southeast corner, the Denver Botanic Gardens established its first plantings in 1953. Denver landscape architect Saco DeBoer drew up a master plan for the area, but before long the gardens moved to their current location between Cheesman Park and Congress Park. In the park’s southwest corner, new traffic patterns resulted in the elimination of the park’s East Eighteenth Avenue entrance and the isolation of the park’s far southwest tip as a traffic island.
The layout of City Park still largely reflects the early designs of Meryweather, Graves, and Schuetze. Aside from the growth of the Denver Zoo and the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, the only major construction has been the replacement of older structures with new ones. In 1929 the present pavilion, designed by William E. Fisher and John J. Humphreys, replaced an earlier pavilion that dated to 1896. And in 1984 the present bandstand east of the pavilion replaced an earlier one that dated to 1924.
The park continues to be a popular spot for recreation and hosts a wide variety of events, including the start and finish of the Colfax Marathon in May, the Colorado Black Arts Festival in July, free City Park Jazz concerts during the summer, a weekly farmers market at the Esplanade, and a large number of shorter running races and other sporting events throughout the year.