Press Releases

What’s Out There Weekend Denver October 10-11 features Free, Expert-Led Tours of the Mile High City’s Landscapes, Parks, and Open Spaces

Part of a nationwide program that reveals the stories of places that are part of our daily lives 


Media Contact: Nord Wennerstrom | T: 202.483.0553  | M: 202.225.7076 | E: nord@tclf.org


Part of a nationwide program that reveals the stories of places that are part of our daily lives 

Washington, D.C. (September 23, 2015) – The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announces What’s Out There Weekend Denver, October 10-11, 2015 featuring nearly two-dozen free, expert-led tours of Denver’s most significant landscapes. These tours enable people to discover the design history of places they may pass every day but don’t necessarily know about, including the site designers, and more broadly, about landscape architecture and city shaping. The event is presented in association with local and national partners, with generous support provided by the National Endowment for the Arts – Art Works program, Bartlett Tree Experts, and Design Workshop. Registration is required and capacity is limited. 

The tours, led by landscape architects, historians, academics, and park managers, will be at these sites: 

• 16th Street Mall 

• Alamo Placita Park 

• Babi Yar Memorial Park 

• Berkeley Lake Park 

• Cheesman Park and Esplanade 

• City of Cuernavaca Park 

• City Park and Esplanade 

• Civic Center Park 

• Commons Park 

• Confluence Park 

• Curtis Park Historic District and Mestizo-Curtis Park 

• Denver Botanic Gardens 

• Downing Street Parkway 

• Fairmount Cemetery 

• Genesee Park 

• Governor's Residence at the Boettcher Mansion 

• Hungarian Freedom Park 

• Inspiration Point Park 

• Northside Park 

• Red Rocks Park and Amphitheater 

• Riverside Cemetery 

• Shop Creek 

• Sloan's Lake Park 

• South Marion Street Parkway 

• Speer Boulevard 

• University of Denver 

• Washington Park

According to Don and Carolyn Etter, former co-Managers of Denver's Department of Parks and Recreation, “In the end, the city became a work of urban landscape art, a garden city if you will. And the subsequent mountain extension of the system was promptly recognized as a unique tourist attraction and a gateway to the Rocky Mountains.” Leveraging its unique geographic position at the convergence of the American grasslands and the Rocky Mountains, Denver is an unparalleled setting for a diverse collection of designed landscapes. Today, in this semi-arid climate rich in natural, scenic, historic, and cultural values and a 200-mile-long backdrop of snow-capped mountains, Denver’s public parks total more than 6,000 acres. 

These tours are complemented by TCLF’s free, online What’s Out There Denver Guide that includes individual site entries along with overarching narratives, maps, and historic photographs. The guide is part of a series that reveals and interprets unrivaled landscape legacies of cities in North America. 

What’s Out There Denver dovetails with TCLF’s web-based What’s Out There, the nation’s most comprehensive searchable database of historic designed landscapes. The database currently features more than 1,800 sites, 10,000 images, and 900 designer profiles. What’s Out There is optimized for iPhones and similar handheld devices, and includes What’s Nearby, a GPS-enabled function that locates all landscapes in the database within a 25-mile radius of any given location. 

About The Cultural Landscape Foundation

The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), founded in 1998, is a non-profit foundation that provides people with the ability to see, understand and value landscape architecture, its practitioners, and our shared landscape legacy in the way many people have learned to do with buildings and their designers. Through its website, lectures, outreach and publishing, TCLF broadens the support and understanding for cultural landscapes nationwide to help safeguard our priceless heritage for future generations. TCLF makes a special effort to heighten the awareness of those who impact cultural landscapes, assist groups and organizations working to increase the appreciation and recognition of cultural landscapes, and develop educational tools for young people to better connect them to their cultural landscape environs. 

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