Elitch Gardens

The park you see is Elitch Gardens, though it has been in Denver far longer than this location suggests. John and Mary Elitch opened Elitch Zoological Gardens on May first, eighteen ninety, on a farm in what was then the northwest edge of the city. It became the first zoo west of Chicago and combined animal exhibits with a summer stock theater that drew crowds of up to six thousand people.

John Elitch died the following year, and Mary took over, becoming the first woman in the country to own and manage a zoo. She ran it for twenty-six years. A ballroom called the Trocadero opened on the original grounds in nineteen seventeen and became one of the great swing-era dance halls in the West, hosting Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Tommy Dorsey.

For more than thirty years a Saturday night radio program broadcast from there over KOA, reaching listeners across thirty states. A hand-carved carousel built by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company arrived in nineteen oh six and is still operating. The park moved from its original twenty-eight-acre northwest Denver site to this downtown riverfront location on May twenty-seventh, nineteen ninety-five, bringing fifteen of its major rides along.

The old grounds were later redeveloped as Highlands Garden Village.