Confluence Park

Below you, where Cherry Creek meets the South Platte River, is Confluence Park, the outdoor living room of Lower Downtown. The city shaped the South Platte bank here into concrete chutes and drops that create a small whitewater course inside the urban grid. On warm days you will see kayakers running the drops and tubers on inflatable rings, with the downtown skyline rising above them.

The Cherry Creek Trail and the South Platte River Trail each run for many miles, placing the park at the hub of one of the largest urban trail networks in the region. Right beside the park stands a large outdoor retailer inside the old Denver Tramway Powerhouse, built around the turn of the twentieth century to generate electricity for the city's streetcar network. The powerhouse drew cooling water from the South Platte and sat close to the coal lines feeding its boilers.

The tramway shut down in nineteen fifty, and after several other uses the building was renovated and reopened as a store, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The park is also where Denver started. After gold was found in eighteen fifty-eight, the first settlers founded Denver near this confluence.