The Front Range has a bounty of great parks, capped by formal, urban spaces, like Cheesman and Washington parks, and tamed wild settings, like Red Rocks and Lookout Mountain.
Between those great icons is a network of open lands that resist development and traffic and preserve a direct connection between the bottoms of our feet and the earth we all share: The parkways, with their broad, planted medians, our open college campuses, manicured golf courses, even the historic pedestrian mall at the center of things on Denver’s 16th Street.
None of it got there by accident, as the new “What’s Out There Denver” online guide reminds us in inviting detail. Our natural places were planned by generations of forward-thinking civic leaders and landscape architects who understood how preserved green spaces balance all of the asphalt and concrete of city life. Denver’s arid climate will never produce lush scenery, but the more than 5,000 acres of parkland the city controls within its borders make us one of the greenest places in the country.
The free guide profiles 64 landscaped sites in the region with the intent of getting people out there. There are obvious entries, like Civic Center and City Park, but also overlooked areas, like Babi Yar Park and the campus of Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design. The boundaries stretch west to include Dedisse Park in Evergreen, north to the great Arborland in Milliken and south to the vast U.S. Air Force Academy.
The GPS-enabled mobile version has a convenient “What’s Nearby?” button that leads you to places close to your location. Click again and you get directions. “Anything within a 25-mile radius will pop up,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation.
“What’s Out There Denver” — access it at tinyurl.com/whatsouttheredenver — is the first in a series of city guides to be put out by the Washington D.C.-based foundation, whose goal is to remind people of the value of landscaped places and encourage their enjoyment.
Its greater goal is to advance the preservation of good design and to bring attention to the men and women who created it. The foundation keeps an easily accessible national online data base with 1,700 significant sites, 900 designer profiles and 10,000 images.
The Denver guide is culled from that info (with a few of the pages yet to be filled out). Contributions came from the national and Colorado chapters of the American Society of Landscape Architects and the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado, Denver. The Denver firm, Design Workshop, helped fund the project.
Perhaps most interesting are the guide’s pages on the people who had a hand in shaping our landscaped terrain, from the Olmsted Brothers, S.R. DeBoer and Lawrence Halprin to more local names, such as Jane Silverstein Ries.
These are true design stars, with international reputations, and Denver will always have the lands of their labors.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation is also planning to sponsor a What’s Out There Weekend in Denver in the summer of 2015, featuring more than two dozen free, expert-led tours of significant landscaped sites. Details to come.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
