Your route today crosses the bluff locals nicknamed LoHi — Lower Highlands — a landscape of Victorian cottages remade by gentrification. This bluff above the South Platte River was among the first areas outside the original Denver townsite to be developed, attracting working-class Irish and Italian immigrants alongside Mexican American families who made the broader Highland neighborhood the center of Denver's Chicano community. By the 1990s, LoHi was a neighborhood of modest Victorian cottages, Hispanic-owned businesses, and churches that had served the community for generations.
Then, rapidly and controversially, it became one of the most intensely gentrified neighborhoods in the American West. The Denver housing boom of the 2000s and 2010s transformed block after block: Victorian cottages gave way to angular condos, family-run taquerias were replaced by craft cocktail bars, and property values climbed to levels that displaced many long-established families. The tension between those who remember LoHi before and those who arrived after is part of the ongoing conversation about what Denver is becoming.