Your route traces Denver's oldest residential neighborhood, platted in 1868, where Victorian and Edwardian houses still line the high plains streets. Curtis Park was platted in 1868, a decade after Denver's founding, when enough people had decided to stay that it made sense to build neighborhoods beyond the commercial core. The park at the center — Denver's oldest — was named for Samuel S. Curtis, a Civil War general who served as mayor, and the surrounding blocks were developed with the modest but solidly built Queen Anne and Italianate houses that surviving members of the gold rush generation built for themselves.
The neighborhood was targeted for urban renewal projects that would have demolished much of it, but a combination of community resistance and the growing historic preservation movement saved the housing stock. What emerged is one of the most authentically preserved Victorian residential neighborhoods in the American West. Walk the side streets and observe the variety — worker's cottages beside small businessmen's two-story homes beside the occasional grander house built by someone who had done particularly well in the silver economy.