City Park

(entry for 1/22/2025)

Many towns have a feature called ‘City Park,’ but for me there’s only one place that deserves the name. It’s City Park in Denver.

There are many parks in Denver, and I have already written about one—Cheesman Park, of the nightmare material. (You can click HERE if you missed it.) But Cheesman Park is only 80 acres, while City Park is 330, so there’s no comparison in that regard. (Plus I have never had a nightmare situated in the larger space.)

I was too young to remember my first visit to City Park, but as soon as my memory developed engough storage space, I began collecting memories of the place. Most of our visits were in the late spring and early summer, plus occasionally in the fall. So why am I writing about it now, in the middle of winter? Because I miss it more now than at any other time of year!

What made the Park so special? Many things.

The Denver Zoo, with its famous blind polar bear (sadly now passed on). The Pavillion and Fountain, with its Band Stand (also passed on, replaced by a rock-band gazebo). The two lakes. The Museum of Natural Histroy (now renamed the Museum of Histroy and Science). The popcorn.

Ah, the popcorn! Technically, the best popcorn in the world was not precisely in the Park itself. It was right across the street, on the east side of Colorado Blvd. (The park was on the west side.) The Popcorn Man, as he was universally called, could not get permission to set up in the park, which had its own Popcorn Stand about halfway around the larger lake on the north side. (It charged a nickel per box, and was sort of OK, but not spectacular.)

So The Popcorn Man set up his rollable stand on the northeast corner of Montview Boulevard and Colorado, right across from the museum, and even though he charged a dime per box the people lined up literally all the way around the block to partake. Eventually.

He was the slowest popcorn man in the history of popcorn men. It took him a full two minutes to fill one quart-size box with popcorn. Why? Because he paused every two inches or so to pour in about a teaspoon-full of real melted butter. Then another two inches of popcorn. Then more butter. Finally, salt, and more butter.

Your fingers tasted and looked like melted butter for about an hour afterward.

Was it worth the wait and the dime? Oh, my, yes! It was the best popcorn in the world and no one minded at all. In fact, the wait was part of the charm, as was watching the process, when you could get close enough to see!

This photo is very similar to his, though his was a bit larger.

When the last customer had been served one last slow boxfull, around ten o’clock every Saturday night, the man rolled his cart away, and he wasn’t seen for another week. Nobody knew where he lived or where the cart went at night or where it came back from the next week. Nobody cared. All we cared was that he did come and did perform his magic.

Another kind of magic was the Museum. It had the usual stuffed-animal dioramas that most similar museums feature, but there was something special about them. Some re-created actual Rocky Mountain scenes, and some were imaginary. My favorite, and everyone else’s favorite too, as determined by vote many years later, was the Ice Floe scene from the extreme north. It was barely lit at all, as was appropriate for a scene set well above the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter.

A mother Polar Bear has killed a seal and is feeding her two cubs. Everything is so real you can almost hear the sounds they are making. (Except the seal, of course, who is convincingly dead, with its belly ripped open and all the gore poking out.)

People have always stood in silence in front of this diorama. The scene demands it. It is so primal and cold and beautiful in a terrifying way. You just stare and can’t make a sound.

The museum had then, and still has, many other attractions, too, incuding glow-in-the-dark minerals, dinosaur skeletons, mounted butterflies by the hundreds, birds from all over the world, and displays that show how the Rockies were formed. It also has expanded since my day and has interactive science experiments and even moon rocks, but today as then the highlight is that Arctic scene with polar bears.

There are live bears, also, in the zoo, though our beloved blind one is long gone. His name was Velox, and he’s buried there, near the moated rocks where he lived most of his life. He died in 1961 at age 27, and was mourned by thousands. Here’s his picture, as he strikes his most familiar pose.

He was constantly begging for food, and when you threw it to him he found it by smell, unless it fell into the water in the moat, which happened far too often, as it was a wide moat.

There were of course many other animals in the zoo, most of them in natural enclosures that mimicked their natural habitat. The exception was the ‘monkey island.’ The entire island was covered with a huge net. Otherwise, the zoo would have had no monkeys. They would all have escaped.

There were hundreds of ducks, too, though they weren’t in the zoo. They were in, and around, the smaler of the two lakes, called Duck Lake. Most of them were Mallards, with a few assorted other species. Once I saw a male Wood Duck there, the only living one I’ve ever seen.

But the starring attraction wasn’t the ducks, or the zoo, or the museum, or even the popcorn man. The star of the show was the fountain. (A picture of the Pavilion and the fountain in daytime is at the head of this post. The two photos below are of the fountain at twilight before the lights come on, and of one color pattern it can do at night during the light show. (There are literally thousands of patterns it can do.)

In my day, the lights were all incandescent, and they were turned on and off by real human beings in accordance with a pre-programmed light show. Nowadays it’s all LED of course, and all done by computer. The old concrete structure that held the water jets decayed years ago, but was replaced by newer materials in a shape that exactly mirrored the old one. You can’t tell the difference.

Although the old bandstand is long gone and replaced by a much smaller open-sided gazebo, the atmosphere is still there. In my memory, I can go back and listen to the Concert Band, and watch the fountain, and look up at the pavillion towers, where someone still controls the computerized light show, different every night.

And, if I have any left, I can eat the ten-cent popcorn.

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