Washington Park

Welcome to Washington Park

The park came first, and the neighborhood grew toward it. Denver began condemning land around Smith Lake in 1897 and had the park at its current size by 1904, naming it for the centennial of George Washington's death. Most of the housing around it went up between 1900 and 1940, predominantly brick, which is why the blocks read as a single coherent period in a way much of Denver does not. The park itself is a mile long and a quarter mile wide, with two lakes, a three-mile perimeter loop, and an 1867 irrigation ditch running straight through the middle — City Ditch, Denver's first major water project, listed on the National Register in its own right and the feature the park was designed around.

What Defines a Washington Park Home

• Early-twentieth-century brick, at scale. The overwhelming majority of homes were built between 1900 and 1940, with some late-nineteenth-century houses in West Wash Park.
• Compact lots, premium ground. Sites here average smaller than Hilltop's, and the tight pattern is part of what makes the blocks walkable.
• Redevelopment pressure is old news. The neighborhood's preservation movement dates to the 1980s, and additions and replacements have been a live local conversation ever since.
• The park as a shared amenity. Ten tennis courts, a lawn bowling green, two historic formal gardens, a 1913 boathouse pavilion available for events, and a loop that functions as the neighborhood's front porch.

Living in Washington Park

Five nationally significant designers worked on this park across seven decades — Reinhard Schuetze, George Kessler, the Olmsted Brothers, S.R. DeBoer, and J.J.B. Benedict — and the American Planning Association named it one of its Great Public Spaces in America in 2012. Just east, Historic South Gaylord Street calls itself Denver's second oldest shopping district, with restaurants and shops filling converted nineteenth-century houses along the 1000 block, plus a summer kickoff festival and a Halloween trick-or-treat street. Steele Elementary sits on Marion Parkway, and South High School — Fisher & Fisher's mid-1920s building with its landmark clock tower, National Register–listed in 2022 — borders the park's south end. Light rail stops at Louisiana and Pearl.