Why go
City Park and Washington Park show the city’s planned park tradition, while the South Platte Greenway follows a rehabilitated urban river. Confluence Park provides an easy downtown entry to the waterways; a longer greenway outing asks for more time and a weather check.
The full story
Many Denver parks took shape during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mayor Robert Speer’s beautification program expanded parks and parkways, and landscape architect Reinhard Schuetze worked on City Park, Washington Park and Cheesman Park. The planted spaces and tree-lined routes changed the look of a city on the dry plains. The river tells a different part of the story. Denver and neighboring jurisdictions began rehabilitating the urban South Platte and its tributaries for recreation in the 1970s. The South Platte Greenway now gives walkers and cyclists a way to follow that corridor through and beyond the city. At Confluence Park, Cherry Creek joins the South Platte close to the original town sites. Use the confluence for a short urban riverside pause, or make the greenway itself the purpose of a longer outing.