History of Sun Valley Neighborhood

Today the Sun Valley neighborhood, or “The Bottoms,” is a long, diverse stretch of land bordering the South Platte river. This is not a neighborhood in the traditional sense. The borders of this neighborhood were established in the 1970s. It encompasses a mix of industrial development, public housing, and a stadium district. The history of this neighborhood reveals much about Denver’s city planning priorities over time. 

Beginning as a remote area known as “No Man’s Land” in Denver’s early history, it transformed into a residential community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants by the 1880s. Throughout the twentieth century, residential homes were demolished to accommodate highways and the growth of a stadium district. After a zoning ordinance that designated this area as industrial, residential development declined. The only exceptions were public housing projects built by the city through the mid- to late-twentieth century. Sun Valley is now the most impoverished neighborhood in the city, due to the concentration of public housing projects combined with a lack of private housing.

This project was made possible by Denver Public Library’s Wes Brown Map Internship. The Sun Valley StoryMap neighborhood history highlights maps and images from the Denver Public Library Special Collections to convey how this area’s built environment changed throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The city’s actions and decisions related to this neighborhood are put into focus, emphasizing that the neighborhood we know as Sun Valley today exists in its current form only because of government intervention. Zoning ordinances, highway projects, public housing, and stadium projects have converged to create a contested space that attempts to cater to residents, heavy industry, and stadium events all at once. 

While it is impossible to predict how the neighborhood will continue to change, given ongoing development projects in the neighborhood, the history laid out in this StoryMap will help contextualize what factors and decisions led to the built environment we see today in Sun Valley.