Jolon Clark walks a dog named Park Hill Dave most mornings on the old golf course. Dave used to run wild on the property back when it was fenced off and abandoned, chasing whatever crossed the fairways until Denver Parks and Recreation caught him, trained him, and more or less adopted the neighborhood as his own. Now Clark, the department's executive director, walks him on the same 155 acres where he used to roam free, except the fairways are now called Park Hill Park and anyone can walk there too, from sunrise to sunset, seven days a week.
If you've been out there since it opened on October 28, 2025, you already know what that means in practice: trails, open sky, dog walkers, joggers, and grass that still remembers being a golf course. What you might not know is that the neighborhood's biggest new amenity is currently in a stretch where nothing visible is happening and everything that matters is happening anyway. The city's own engagement site says it plainly: there are no planned meetings right now, and the design team won't be back in front of residents until 2027. That sounds like a pause. It isn't one. A request for qualifications for the next phase of design work went out on June 30, and whoever the city hires from that process will spend the next year deciding what this park actually becomes, without another public forum until the work is mostly locked in.
What You're Actually Walking Through Right Now
Mayor Mike Johnston called the park "a bit of a fixer-upper" the day it opened, and nine months later that description still holds. The site operates under passive recreation rules only: existing trails, natural scenery, wildlife viewing, no new structures, no programmed sports fields, no restrooms built for a park this size. Parts of the perimeter stayed fenced through the fall while crews handled basic maintenance and lighting. This is the version of Park Hill Park that exists today at East 35th Avenue and Colorado Boulevard, north of the 23rd Avenue restaurant corridor and separate from the older, denser City Park closer to downtown.
The gap between that current state and the finished vision is the whole story. Denver Parks and Recreation planning supervisor Stacie West told Axios in January that on-site construction is likely to begin within about two years, which puts realistic groundbreaking somewhere around 2028. Longtime resident Deronn Turner, who lives in northeast Park Hill and has sat through years of meetings about this land, described herself to Axios as "cautiously optimistic" about whether the finished park will actually serve the community that fought for it. That mix of patience and skepticism is the accurate read on where things stand, not the renderings.
The Request Nobody Outside City Hall Noticed
Here's the part that matters for anyone who lives within walking distance. The framework plan, the big-picture vision that came out of eight rounds of community engagement between August 2025 and January 2026 and nearly 6,000 public comments, is finished. Sasaki, the design firm the city hired to run that process, delivered a preferred plan built around four themes: honoring the neighborhood's history, building a durable modern park, balancing quiet space with active space, and creating room for community joy. A public art thread called the 303 Artway is meant to run through the site, naming the visionaries and organizers connected to this specific stretch of northeast Denver.
What comes next is not another round of listening. It's execution. The June 30 RFQ is the city soliciting a design team to turn Sasaki's framework into actual construction drawings, phased amenities, and a build sequence. Once that team is selected, they'll spend roughly a year working out details that determine where trails actually go, which corner gets the destination playground, and how the athletic fields line up along Colorado Boulevard. Residents won't see another open house until 2027. That means the choices being made this year, quietly, by a design team most people in the neighborhood haven't heard of yet, are the choices that will define daily use of this park for the next decade.
What $70 Million Covers, and What It Doesn't
The number attached to this project that gets repeated most often is $70 million, the amount committed through the 2025 Vibrant Denver Bond, which Denver voters approved as part of a much larger citywide infrastructure package last November. That figure covers the design work now underway and the first phase of built improvements, things like trail systems, turf restoration, and basic park infrastructure.
It does not cover the amenity most people are actually waiting for. City planning staff have confirmed that a proposed field house, large enough to host indoor sports like soccer and ice hockey and unlike anything currently in Denver's park system, has no identified funding source. That's a specific, quantifiable gap between the vision and the money. It means the field house isn't scheduled, isn't budgeted, and isn't guaranteed to happen on any particular timeline. What the $70 million buys first is the unglamorous groundwork: trails, drainage, tree canopy, the creek bed that will run through the middle of the site to manage stormwater the way the old golf course's irrigation system never had to. The showpiece structures come later, if and when a second funding source materializes.
For a neighborhood that watched this land sit fenced and contested for years, that sequencing is worth understanding on its own terms. Visible change here is going to look like better paths and more trees before it looks like a fieldhouse roofline against the sky.
Why the Scale Actually Matters
Clark made a comparison at the September 2025 open house at Hiawatha Davis Jr. Recreation Center that's easy to lose in the acreage talk: the last time Denver designed and opened a park this size was Washington Park in 1911. Not a nearby comparison, not a similar-scale example from another city. The literal last time. That frames what's different about Park Hill Park compared to smaller neighborhood gathering spots like the retail block at 23rd and Oneida also called Oneida Park, or even the more established grounds at City Park itself.
The land's own history explains why it took this long to get here. It operated as a dairy farm in the early twentieth century, supported the neighboring Lowry Airfield through the 1920s, then became a private golf course in 1931 that stayed open until 2018. A developer bought the site in 2019 hoping to build housing and retail. Voters rejected that plan at the ballot box in 2023. The city and the landowner, Westside Investment Partners, eventually settled the standoff through a land swap that Mayor Johnston announced in January 2025, trading acreage near Denver International Airport for the golf course itself, with the city council approving the rezoning that June. Clark put it simply on opening day: "with 155 acres, there can be a little something for everyone." That's not a marketing line. It's closer to a planning constraint turned into an opportunity, the reason the framework balances quiet trail space with active athletic fields instead of picking one identity for the whole site.
What This Means for Your Next Walk
None of this changes what you can do at Park Hill Park this week. It's open from sunrise to sunset. The trails are unmarked in places and the grass is still shaggy in others, but it's there, and it's yours to use. What changes is how you should think about the next twelve months. The absence of scheduled meetings isn't evidence that the project stalled. It's evidence that the decision-making moved from public rooms into a design team's office, and it will stay there until 2027 unless the city changes course. If you want a say in how this specific park turns out, the window to watch for isn't a meeting on next month's calendar. It's the announcement of which firm wins that RFQ, because that's the team that will decide, largely without you, what your daily walk looks like starting around 2028.
Park Hill has always been a neighborhood that pays attention to its own infrastructure, from the block clubs on the 33rd Avenue corridor to the community gardens that outlasted decades of disinvestment. This is one more thing worth tracking with that same attention, not because it's finished, but because it's the opposite of finished right now, and that's exactly when the shape of a place gets decided.
If you're curious how a project like this affects home values or long-term livability in Park Hill or any of the surrounding neighborhoods, that's a conversation Coleen Sanders has regularly with clients who already live here. Let's Connect.
