One Fall After Opening Day, Park Hill Park Still Has No Construction Date

"It's going to take them a long time to finish this project, but it's going to be wonderful."

That's Kevin Doyle, whose backyard in Northeast Park Hill backs straight onto the 155 acres everyone still calls the old golf course, even though it hasn't been one since 2018. Doyle has watched joggers, cyclists, and dog walkers cut through the space almost every day since it opened to the public last October. He's also watched nothing get built. Both things are true at once, and understanding why tells you more about this park's near future than any renderings the city has released so far.

What "open" actually means right now

Park Hill Park opened for what Denver Parks and Recreation calls passive recreation on October 28, 2025. In practice that means the gates are unlocked during daylight hours, the old cart paths and fairways are walkable, and that's about it. There's no lighting installed, so the site is managed on a dusk-to-dawn basis. Some of the walking paths have gone rough since the golf course maintenance stopped, a fact Denver7 confirmed as recently as this August when it rode along with Doyle on a loop of the property.

None of that has kept people away. The same Denver7 visit described a steady stream of moms with strollers, bikers, and dog walkers using the grounds on an ordinary weekday. If you live in Park Hill and haven't walked it yet, the honest expectation to set is this: bring water, expect uneven ground in places, and don't count on facilities. What you're walking through is still functionally a decommissioned golf course that the public happens to be allowed on, not a finished park.

The timeline that quietly slipped

When the park first opened, the framing from Denver Parks and Recreation was that design work would begin in 2026 with construction to follow soon after. That's what executive director Jolon Clark told the Colorado Sun on opening day. It was a reasonable thing to say at the time. It's also not what's happening.

By January 2026, Axios Denver was reporting that the city had finished a framework plan (the big-picture vision, not construction drawings) after eight months of community meetings that pulled in nearly 6,000 public comments. That framework was unveiled at a public meeting at Smith Elementary School in Northeast Park Hill, and it names four guiding principles the eventual park is supposed to reflect: celebrating Denver's culture and history, building a resilient and modern park, balancing the serene with the vibrant activity, and fostering joy and belonging. Even at that point, Axios noted that on-site work was likely still two years out.

By August 2026, the timeline had slipped further still. Denver Parks and Recreation told Denver7 that the city plans to hire a design firm by the end of this year, with additional community feedback sessions not scheduled until the first quarter of 2027. That's a materially slower pace than the "design in 2026, construction soon after" language from the opening-day coverage just ten months earlier. A framework plan is not a construction plan, and a construction plan doesn't exist yet.

Here's how the milestones actually stack up:

Laid out that way, the pattern is clear. Every step so far has been visioning, funding, and framework. The step where shovels actually go in the ground hasn't been scheduled, only anticipated.

What's funded and what isn't

The $70 million in bond money that voters approved last November is real and it's earmarked specifically for the first phase of construction at Park Hill Park. That's not nothing. But it also isn't the whole project. Denver's own six-year capital planning documents have put the full build-out somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million, and the Denver Park Trust, a nonprofit formed to help raise private money for the site, has pointed to comparable big-city park projects that ran past $250 million once all phases were complete.

So the honest math for a Park Hill resident watching this unfold: the city has secured enough money to start, not enough to finish, and hasn't yet hired the firm that will turn the framework's four guiding principles into an actual set of blueprints. Denver is also working with a $200 million citywide budget deficit this year, which is part of why parks officials have been careful not to promise a firm construction date.

The people who've been watching longest

None of this is new territory for the neighbors who fought over this land for years before the city bought it. Woody Garnsey, an open-space advocate who spent close to a decade pushing to keep the site from being developed into housing, told Denverite last November that the bond vote showed "Denver citizens really care about the infrastructure of the city." He'd earned the right to be pleased. The fight over whether this would become a park at all or a mixed-use development ran through ballot measures, a conservation easement dispute, and years of city council hearings before Johnston's land-swap deal settled it in early 2025.

There's a smaller, stranger footnote to that opening day worth knowing if you walk the park regularly. For months before the public opening, a German shepherd ran loose across the old fairways, evading capture until Parks and Rec staff finally trapped him with, as Clark put it, a "juicy stake." Clark ended up adopting the dog himself. He goes by Park Hill Dave, and he was on a leash next to Clark at the ribbon-cutting in October 2025. If you spot a Parks and Rec staffer walking a German shepherd out there, that's likely him.

What to actually expect this fall

If you're heading out to Park Hill Park in the coming weeks, expect the same thing Doyle described in August: a lot of casual daily use, no lighting after dusk, and stretches of path that haven't been resurfaced since the golf course closed. The overgrown roughs and fairway contours are still visible if you know what a golf course looks like underneath. None of that is a design flaw. It's a property in a long holding pattern between one use and the next.

The design firm the city hasn't hired yet will spend 2027 translating four broad principles into an actual site plan: where the sports fields go, what the stormwater and irrigation systems look like, which sections become garden space versus open meadow. Until that happens, the park you're walking today is essentially what you'll be walking a year from now. That's not a criticism of the pace. Projects of this scale, on land this size, with a city managing a real budget shortfall, tend to move in years, not months. It's simply the honest state of things if you live two blocks from the fence line and have been wondering when the bulldozers show up.

They're not showing up yet. But the walking is good, the dog is friendly, and the neighbors who spent years fighting for this land seem content to wait for it to be built right.

If you're weighing what a home near Park Hill Park might be worth to you, Mckinze Casey can walk you through what's actually happening on the ground here and in every corner of Park Hill. Request a Private Consultation to talk specifics.