PH: Chaffee Park

Playground Hopping

Location: Chaffee Park, Northwest Denver at 44th and Tejon Street

     Ultimately I wouldn’t recommend this park for an outing, but I was in the area with a new charge for a few days and this was the closest park that I found so I should at least give my opinion (clearly I will be doing much more research if I end up in the area again). Large fields, a playground and swings provide for some enjoyment, although unfortunately the climber is falling apart (a rope to climb on extending from one end of the climber to the other is missing; a small bulldozer climber for little ones has a large crack down the middle of the slide). Another disheartening sight that I noticed was the people. When we visited this playground just before 5:00pm I noticed not one but two grown men passed out in the park- one right in the middle of the field moaning every so often, and another near the bathrooms who attempted to stand up and walk at one point but was clearly unstable enough to hold his own balance. I know that this is the world we are living in today, but for the amount of parks that I’ve visited in Denver I’ve never seen such nonsense so close to the children’s play area. With a young toddler who is only focused on playing we were fine, but if I had older children I would’ve felt very uncomfortable letting them play so close to such sad sites. What the hell, Denver? I thought we were better than this…