For most of the last seven years, the fenced-off rectangle bounded by Colorado Boulevard, 35th, Dahlia, and 40th has been the thing Park Hill residents walked around rather than through. The old golf course closed in 2018, sat behind chain link during a private developer's push, and then behind more chain link during the litigation that followed. This is the first summer that changes.
Park Hill Park opened to the public in late October 2025, and summer 2026 is the first full season the 155 acres are usable during daylight hours. That single fact reshapes the neighborhood's summer geography more than any restaurant opening or festival addition. If your Saturday routine has been Montview to Oneida and back, the map now runs a different direction.
The park that took a decade to open
The site's history is worth stating plainly because it explains what you'll see and what you won't. The Park Hill Golf Course shuttered in 2018 and was purchased by a private developer in 2019. The community came together to pass a vote to prohibit development on the site, and in 2025, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston finalized a historic land swap that involved exchanging undeveloped industrial land near Denver International Airport. The swap ended years of litigation and community organizing, converting what had become fenced-off, inaccessible terrain into what is now Denver's fourth-largest public park.
In January 2025, Mayor Johnston announced the City's acquisition of the 155-acre former Park Hill Golf Course—the largest addition of urban parkland since Wash Park in 1901. That's the comparison worth holding in mind. The last time Denver added open space at this scale, the Model T was three years from production.
"With 155 acres, there can be a little something for everyone," Denver Parks and Recreation director Jolon Clark told the Colorado Sun at the October 2025 opening.
What is actually there this summer
The framework plan is not the park you will walk through in July. The final framework was presented in January of 2026, and the next stages of design and planning will focus on developing framework details, prioritizing amenities, developing phasing strategies, and implementing the first phase of the project. Construction of the fieldhouse, the water features, the sports courts, and the plaza is years out.
What you get right now is the raw land, opened up, with interim uses that Denver Parks and Recreation has been rolling in. Expect:
- A dog park, disc golf, picnic tables, and a walking trail as low-cost interim amenities
- Mature tree canopy that had been growing behind the fence since the 1930s
- Open turf where the fairways used to run, currently unstructured
- Public access during daylight hours only
Sasaki's current design includes sports fields, a dog park, a miniature golf course, an outdoor adventure area, a field house, a creek and more, and a major project will be building a large field house allowing indoor sports, like soccer and ice hockey, something the city's park system doesn't currently have. None of that is standing yet. What is standing is a long, unusually flat piece of northeast Denver you can walk end to end for the first time since Nixon was in office.
The funding runway is clearer than the timeline. The framework plan carries a commitment of $70 million in bond funding, approved as part of the 2025 Vibrant Denver Bond package voters passed in November.
Oneida Park is still the corner
The park changes the north edge of the neighborhood. It does not replace the corner at 22nd and Oneida, and it does not touch the strip along East 23rd where most of Park Hill's actual dinner reservations get made. The Oneida cluster keeps doing the work it has been doing.
Esters Oneida Park anchors it. Around the corner and down the block, Neko Ramen & Rice has kept its social-media hold on the neighborhood, The Cherry Tomato continues its long-running Italian run, and Lucina Eatery & Bar has settled in as the small-plates option. South American dishes and delicious cocktails. Well done and certainly needed in the Park Hill neighborhood, is the read on Lucina from OpenTable, and the paella is what the regulars order. Bistro Vendome, the French bistro from Jennifer Jasinski and Beth Gruitch, keeps a garden patio open through the summer months and runs happy hour from four to six every day.
The Park Hill Farm & Flea has run its Thursday-night market series at Oneida Park in past summers, pairing 40-plus vendors with food trucks and live music. Confirm the 2026 dates against the market's own channels before you walk over.
Colfax has the new arrivals
The addresses on East Colfax between Colorado and Monaco keep getting turned over, and the newest one worth knowing this summer is Denver Cafe and Kava. The upcoming cafe is opening on 5501 E Colfax Ave. The founding team at the upcoming cafe is made up of a group friends who met at another sober bar, Golden Kava Lounge. The team is made up of Kevin Bloom, Elizabeth Leung, Cam Webbe, Jayden MacDonald and Jack Kestian. Kestian also owns the aforementioned Golden Kava Lounge. Denver Cafe and Kava will serve an array of classic coffees with in-house syrups and Chinese and Vietnamese teas, following Leung's family's recipes.
It is a non-alcoholic bar, which is its own signal about who is opening what on Park Hill's southern edge right now. The Golden Kava crew talks about the space as a community room first and a beverage program second, and the Colfax address puts it inside the same walk radius as the Park Hill Library at 4705 Montview.
The volunteer calendar behind everything
The park will get a foundation and a fieldhouse eventually. The programming that fills a Park Hill summer today runs off the same volunteer engine it has for sixty-five years. The Greater Park Hill Community (GPHC) is a non-profit neighborhood organization formed in 1961. The GPHC, managed and staffed largely by volunteers: serves as a liaison between local residents and businesses and the City and County of Denver; publishes a monthly newspaper, the Greater Park Hill News, which is distributed free to residents of Park Hill's administrative neighborhoods and nearby businesses; operates a Youth Jobs Program to help young people ages 12–15 find summer jobs; and sponsors an annual home tour in the fall, The Greater Park Hill Home Tour, which has been held for the past 30 years.
Two summer dates to hold: 6/6 & 6/7—13th Annual Park Hill Art Festival. 100+ local and national artists plus food vendors. 10am–5pm. 4819 E. Montview Blvd. And the Park Hill Library's regular summer programming at 4705 Montview, including the ongoing free advance-directive assistance sessions that GPHC and the library have partnered on.
For farmers markets, the closest full-service option is still the City Park market a few blocks west on the Esplanade, and the Central Park MCA market on 29th runs Sunday mornings from late June through early October. The first Farmers Market of 2026 will be on Sunday, June 21st from 8:30am-12:30pm on the South Green. The Farmers Market will run every Sunday from June 21st until October 11th.
How the map feels different this summer
Here is the thesis. For a decade, Park Hill's gravity ran east-west along Montview, with Oneida as the eastern anchor and City Park as the western one. The fenced golf course was a hole in the map. Residents routed around it the way you route around a construction zone you have stopped noticing.
Opening 155 acres of walkable ground north of 35th shifts that. Not permanently, not for everyone, but noticeably. A weekend that used to run coffee-on-Colfax-then-Montview now credibly runs coffee-then-north-loop-then-Oneida. The interim amenities are modest, but the ground itself is the amenity right now. It is flat, treed, and quiet in a way that most Denver parks stopped being quiet years ago.
The construction phase will change that. When the fieldhouse breaks ground and the sports courts go in and the water features get plumbed, the north edge of Park Hill will be a job site for years. This summer is the window between the fence coming down and the fences going back up around active construction. If you have lived in the neighborhood long enough to remember the golf course as a golf course, this summer is the version of the land nobody has seen since before the closure in 2018.
The house you own sits inside a neighborhood whose usable map just got materially larger. That does not show up on a Zestimate. It shows up in how the block feels on a Saturday morning, and in what a buyer's agent points out on a walk-through three summers from now when the fieldhouse is finished and the miniature golf course is running and everyone has decided the north edge was always the good side.
If you are thinking about what this shift means for your home's positioning, a listing strategy, or a move within Park Hill, Jan Nelsen works these blocks with the design-forward presentation and neighborhood detail these decisions deserve. Reach out when you are ready to talk through it.
