Park Hill Park Is Open Now. Here's What $70 Million Does (and Doesn't) Build.

Shane Murphy watched the fence go up around the old golf course from his house down the street, then watched the grass go yellow and the sprinklers get vandalized for the better part of seven years. When the gates finally opened on October 28, 2025, he kept his reaction short: "My first impression is, we've arrived. The park is open, and we kind of go from here."

That "from here" is doing a lot of work. If you've walked the old cart paths since the opening, you already know the park didn't arrive finished. It arrived unlocked. What gets built on those 155 acres over the next few years, and how much of the wish list on the fence posters actually gets funded, comes down to a specific number that Denver voters approved last November, and a much bigger number that still isn't spoken for.

What actually changed on opening day

Park Hill Park is open sunrise to sunset, seven days a week, for what the city calls passive recreation: walking, jogging, wildlife viewing on the existing cart paths. That's it. There's no lighting yet, so nothing happens after dark. Sections of fencing are still up while crews clear overgrowth and check for hazards left over from seven years of neglect. The turf itself still reads like an abandoned golf course, because it is one. The Colorado Sun described the fairways on opening day as still "a bit shaggy," which is a generous way of putting it.

That gap between "open" and "finished" is exactly where two neighbors landed on opposite sides of the same afternoon. Deronn Turner, who lives in northeast Park Hill, told Denver7 she's trying to stay optimistic but wasn't thrilled with what the park offers right now: "It's a little bit disappointing from the perspective of the only thing that can really be done is you can walk your dog here." A few blocks away, Kristen Searcy, who markets a new apartment building across the street, told a different story to the Colorado Sun: her residents are "super excited" just to step outside for a walk, because the building leans hard into being pet-friendly. Same park, same week, two very different bars for what counts as a win.

Why "this summer" became October

The timeline here matters, because it explains why residents are skeptical of new dates. Here's the sequence:

1. December 2018 – The golf course closes and gets fenced off after a purchase deal falls through.
2. July 2019 – Westside Investment Partners buys the site for $24 million, and years of fighting over whether it becomes housing or open space begin. That fight went to Denver voters three separate times, and each time they voted to keep it as open space.
3. January 2025 – Mayor Mike Johnston announces a land swap: Denver trades 145 acres of undeveloped industrial land near the airport for the golf course site. Officials say the park could open by summer.
4. April 2025 – The city hires Sasaki to lead design. Parks and Rec director Jolon Clark says planning will run through the end of the year, with construction design starting in 2026.
5. July 2025 – The target slips to "late summer to early fall."
6. September 2025 – The city misses even that goal. A lease with Westside hasn't been signed yet, so residents still can't legally access the land.
7. October 28, 2025 – The park finally opens, for passive use only.

That's roughly a three-month slide from the original "this summer" promise to the actual gate opening, driven mostly by a lease dispute that had nothing to do with construction. What's notable is that the design work that followed didn't slip the same way. Sasaki presented its final framework plan on schedule in January 2026, at a packed open house at Smith Elementary, after eight rounds of community engagement running from August 2025 through that month. So the lesson for anyone tracking this project isn't "everything here runs late." It's narrower: legal and financial steps (leases, land swaps, ballot measures) have been the bottleneck, not the design process itself.

The framework plan, and what it still doesn't decide

The plan Sasaki presented in January organizes the park around a central strip of natural, ecologically restored land, framed by more active uses at the edges: sports fields and courts along Colorado Boulevard, a destination playground, and a field house tucked into one corner that would let the city offer indoor soccer and ice hockey, something Denver's park system doesn't currently have anywhere else, according to Axios Denver. Around the existing clubhouse, the plan envisions a cultural gathering hub.

That clubhouse detail matters more than it sounds. Before the fences went up, it was where Northeast Park Hill held community celebrations, church services, and weddings. By the time reporters visited in the spring of 2025, vandals had stripped its piping and electrical equipment. Turning it back into a gathering space isn't a minor line item on a rendering. It's rebuilding something the neighborhood actually lost.

What isn't decided yet: the exact number of basketball and tennis courts, and several other specifics that Axios reported are still in flux even after the framework was finalized. The framework is the outline, not the blueprint.

What $70 million actually buys, and what it doesn't

In November 2025, Denver voters passed Ballot Issue 2B, a $175 million citywide parks bond. Of that, $70 million was earmarked specifically for Park Hill Park. According to reporting in the Denver Gazette ahead of the vote, that money is meant to cover the park's basic infrastructure.

So the dog park Deronn Turner and her neighbors are waiting on is, in fact, in the funded column. The field house that shows up on every rendering as the park's signature attraction is not. Back in April 2025, before the bond vote, city budget staff told Denverite that Denver's own six-year capital improvement plan estimated the full build-out could run around $200 million across two phases, with a separate $50 million fieldhouse floated as a possibility the city called "way too early to predict." Nothing in the framework plan or the bond language since then closes that gap. The $70 million funds the park most residents actually described wanting in early surveys. The fieldhouse is still a maybe.

What you can actually do there right now

Until construction starts, the park is what it's always been, minus the fence in most places. The old cart paths work fine for walking or jogging. A local birder tracking the site has logged 18 different bird species moving through the grounds, which gives some sense of what "passive recreation" actually looks like day to day. There's no official leash-free dog area yet, even though plenty of the dog walking already happening there is informal.

The best way to keep up with what changes next is the city's own project page at parkhillpark.org, where survey results and open house materials get posted as they're finalized. That's also where the still-undecided details, like court counts, will eventually get locked in with more community input.

The bigger picture

The land under Park Hill Park carries history that predates the golf course by centuries, tribal ties to the Hinono'eiteen, Nuuchu, and Tsistsistas nations, and a more recent history tied to the neighborhood's Black community and decades of advocacy, including from former Mayor Wellington Webb. None of that gets settled by an opening-day ribbon or a bond vote. What gets built here over the next few years, and what stays a rendering on a fence, will say something real about which promises the city follows through on when the easy part (opening the gate) is done and the harder part (writing the checks) begins.

If you're the kind of Park Hill resident who wants a team that pays attention to what's actually happening on your block, not just the median home price, that's the kind of local read Live.Laugh.Denver. Real Estate Group tries to offer. Whenever you're ready to talk about your own next move in this neighborhood, start your home journey with people who already know where the dog park is supposed to go.