Cheesman Park rests on one of the most macabre foundations in American civic history. Cheesman Park was Denver's first public cemetery — the City Cemetery, established in 1858 and used for three decades as the burial ground for the rapidly dying population of a frontier boomtown. By the late 1880s the city had grown around the cemetery, and city fathers decided to convert it to a park.
The bodies were supposed to be removed first. They were not, at least not all of them. The city contracted with an undertaker to exhume the remains; when he realized how much work was involved, he began cutting corners dramatically — smashing coffins to fit them into smaller boxes, mixing remains, leaving many bodies entirely in place.
An 1893 newspaper exposé revealed the scandal, but the park was built anyway. Bodies continued surfacing during construction for years, and they still occasionally appear during maintenance work. The park today is a 80-acre formal landscape with a neoclassical pavilion at its center.
The surrounding neighborhood has been one of Denver's most established LGBTQ+ communities for decades, and the park has long been a gathering place for that community.