Picture Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Miles Davis playing the clubs here, in the neighborhood once called the Harlem of the West — the heart of Black Denver. Five Points takes its name from the intersection of Welton, Washington, 27th, and 26th Streets converging nearby. African Americans began settling here in the 1880s, drawn by the relative tolerance of a western city that, while deeply segregated in practice, had not enshrined segregation in its founding laws.
By the 1920s Five Points was home to Black-owned businesses, churches, newspapers, and a nightclub scene that attracted the greatest jazz musicians of the era. Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and Miles Davis all played the clubs here, often because they were prohibited from staying in the downtown hotels that booked their performances. The neighborhood was devastated by urban renewal in the 1960s and 1970s — highway construction and redevelopment demolished hundreds of homes and businesses, a pattern repeated in Black neighborhoods across America.
The community that remains carries that history, and recent years have brought both renewed investment and gentrification tensions that echo what happened a generation ago.