Recap: Cheesman Park Tour

About the tour: Tour-goers received a comprehensive tour of Cheesman Park and Esplanade at the heart of Denver’s historic Capitol Hill neighborhood. The group experienced the views to the front range and city skyline while learning about the historical and present-day significance of the park’s landscape design and architecture, its relationship to the Denver Botanic Gardens and its role in the greater Denver Parks Plan.

About the park: Designed by Denver’s first landscape architect Reinhard Schuetze and completed by S.R. DeBoer, the park design, adopted from Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, incorporates looping carriageways, open lawns and surrounding forest, crowned by the iconic Neoclassical pavilion.

About the tour guides:

Laurel Raines is a Founding Principal and Landscape Architect at Dig Studio with experience designing public spaces. Coming from a background in environmental science, horticulture and art, Laurel has been motivated to make a difference by creating built environments that are at once beautiful, functionally responsive to the needs of people, reflective of context and environmentally sound.

Audrey Sorensen’s unique project background and design experience supports her understanding of historical context, developing provocative preservation strategies and performing forward-thinking historical and environmental research. She has completed work in urban and rural contexts, in a variety of regions and scales. Audrey is a Landscape Designer at Sasaki.