Rosedale

Rosedale sits just south of Evans Avenue, across the street from Platt Park. South Broadway is its west edge, South Downing Street its east edge, and Yale Avenue runs along the bottom. It's one of Denver's smaller neighborhoods, and a big park fills much of the middle.

An anti-saloon town, then a state home on the gulch

This land started out in the Town of South Denver, which formed in 1886 largely to keep the vice around the Overland Park racetrack out of its streets. Its southern line was Yale Avenue, the same street that closes off Rosedale now. Denver absorbed the town in February 1894.

Until 1971, forty acres of what is now Harvard Gulch Park held the Colorado State Home for Dependent and Neglected Children. The nine-hole golf course you see today sits where the home's vegetable gardens used to be.

Small houses, mostly old ones

Denver Assessor records count about 745 detached houses here. Just under half predate 1940, and 41 percent were built in the two decades after, so new construction is a sliver: about 7 percent, all since 2000. Half the houses are smaller than about 1,030 square feet.

On a slow drive you'll pass 1920s bungalows, a few Victorians and some sharp-edged modern houses. A wave of pop-tops and scrape-and-builds in the 1990s and early 2000s left newer, bigger houses standing next to older houses that never got a major makeover. For a buyer, the math is simple: if you need a fourth bedroom or a real office, you're likely shopping for an addition someone already built, or budgeting to build one yourself.

Harvard Gulch Park and the garden on Logan

Harvard Gulch Park spreads across about 50 acres at Rosedale's center. The recreation center at 550 E. Iliff Ave. has a gym, weight room, pottery studio and art room, plus an outdoor pool that opens for summer. The par-3 course at 660 E. Iliff is walking only, plays in about an hour and offers night golf. Softball fields and volleyball courts fill out the rest, and the Harvard Gulch Trail heads east from the park to Colorado Boulevard.

On Logan Street just south of Iliff, the Rosedale Community Garden is one of the largest and oldest in Denver, with an orchard on site. Rosedale Park and City of Kunming Park add more green space nearby. If you want a park at the end of your block, look at the streets around Harvard Gulch.

Broadway, Downing and the music school on Yale

The restaurants sit on the edges. The Post Chicken & Beer, at 2200 S. Broadway, fries its chicken in a gluten-free dredge and was Westword's pick for best fried chicken in 2021. Over on Downing, Roaming Buffalo Bar-B-Que has been smoking Colorado lamb and bison ribs at 2387 S. Downing since 2015, took Westword's best Colorado-style barbecue award the same year as the Post, and tends to sell out of meats early.

Swallow Hill Music, a school and concert venue that dates to 1979, holds its classes and shows in a former church at 71 E. Yale Ave. The AdventHealth Porter hospital campus sits in the southeast corner. South Pearl Street's shops and restaurants are a short walk north across Evans.

Getting around and the gulch itself

RTD's route 0 runs up and down Broadway, north to the I-25 & Broadway light rail station and Union Station and south to Englewood Station. Route 21 runs along Evans, west to Evans Station and east past the University of Denver to Aurora Metro Center.

Harvard Gulch is one of three waterways in Denver's Waterway Resiliency Program, which plans to restore the waterway and add flood protection for homes and structures near it. The city hasn't published a schedule for that piece yet. Shopping a block or two from the gulch? Pull the flood zone and a homeowners insurance quote before you write.