Sloan's Lake

Sloan's Lake is Denver's second-largest park, and the lake at its center has one of the more entertaining origin stories in the city. The popular legend says that in eighteen sixty-one a farmer named Thomas Sloan struck an underground aquifer while digging a well and woke to find his property flooded. Historians note the timing is murky: a stagecoach driver left for Kansas in June of eighteen sixty-one and returned a couple of years later to find the lake simply there, no one certain exactly how it appeared.

Either way, by the eighteen eighties the lake had become a destination. In eighteen eighty-one, an entrepreneur named Adam Graff opened Manhattan Beach on the north shore, which grew into one of the largest amusement parks west of the Mississippi, with a roller coaster, a dance hall, a zoo, a theater, and a skating rink. A fire destroyed much of it in nineteen oh eight, and the rebuilt version, called Luna Park, closed for good in nineteen fourteen.

The amusement era is long gone. Today the combined lake covers about one hundred seventy-seven acres, and the surrounding park offers jogging paths, boating, fishing, tennis, and one of the best unobstructed views of the downtown skyline you will find anywhere in the city.