Open Book: The Circle Of Beauty
We Must Preserve The Magic Of Park Hill
By Anya Nitczynski
For the GPHN
We in Park Hill, are lucky.
We have a beautiful neighborhood for walking. Sun dappled sidewalks, church roofs covered with snow, and majestic libraries made up my childhood. I’ve grown up with a life children dream about. A block full of kids my age, getting together after dinner every long summer night, playing games our parents and grandparents have played before, or simply making up our own.
As I grow up, I have evolved from capturing the flag to walking around the neighborhood, especially as the quarantine hit. I eventually took one of my closest friends with me, and it’s become a staple of our friendship, to go walking on a particular route as often as possible.
This is rare — having a neighborhood where playing outside or going on a walk is so beautiful it makes your heart hurt. Cities are typically designed for consumerism. Suburbs surround a central city that’s designed for convenience. This means having a financial district, a museum district, so on and so forth. Not only are cities designed this way originally, they’re also expanded in ways that create the ugly city landscapes that aren’t as majestic as, say, the skyscrapers in downtown Denver.
When the city expands outwards, the landscape generally consists of strip malls, huge corporate restaurant chains, large intersections — the kind of landscape that reminds you of the color grey and dreary weather, no matter how green the grass is or how sunny the day is.
Park Hill is a walking neighborhood. One with a landscape of beautiful trees, independently-owned businesses, and a sense of community that consistently surpasses my expectations of neighborly kindness. I’d like to think our abundance of community gardens and many flowerbeds can partially be attributed to the spirit of the average Park Hillian. I also attribute the kindness of the average Park Hillian to their surroundings, which are in turn affected by their kindness. What a beautiful circle. The end result is, Park Hill is the kind of neighborhood where friends get together to walk every Tuesday morning (the highlight of my day on the way to school every week).
Of course, there are exceptions to the beauty of Park Hill. We must stay aware of the development happening within our beloved neighborhood, or we could turn out just like any sad concrete landscape in any other big city in this country.
Future generations deserve to have the same capture-the-flag memories, the same fall colors in the trees. They deserve to feel inspired to grab a coffee from a local shop early in the morning, and proceed on a walk with a designated group at sunrise.
Hold on to the beauty in this neighborhood and reflect on it every once in a while. We are the exception. We are the lucky ones.
Anya Nitczynski is a freshman at Denver School of the Arts. Her column appears monthly in these pages.Anya Nitczynski is an 8th grader at Denver School of the Arts. Her column appears monthly in these pages.