Rick Ottolini is a man of few words.
Until he starts chatting about the sunset from Denver’s Cheesman Park.
When it’s not too cloudy or clear, the software writer sits quietly among regulars at the park’s marble pavilion gazing at its 150-mile panorama of the Rockies.
Ottolini prefers evenings with one-third cloud cover when the sky soaks up incandescent yellows, oranges and pinks.
He has watched so many twilights here that he knows the sun will set no farther north than it does this week next to the Republic Plaza tower at the edge of the downtown skyline. And in the winter, he has noticed, it arcs no farther south than in a gap of trees through which you can see the cross lit up on Mount Lindo.
“It’s kind of like Denver’s Stonehenge,” he says of the pavilion.
The best theatrics, as Ottolini tells it, came during the 2002 Hayman fire, when weeks of smoke set the sky ablaze in deep reds and purples.
The biggest perk is when the wind carries music from concerts at the Botanic Gardens almost as clearly as if you had bought a ticket.
By far the finest evenings, he notes, are the hot ones when the marble is still warm from the sun and you can cool your feet in the fountains.
“That,” Ottolini says, “well, that’s just the best.”
The pavilion was modeled after the Parthenon and dedicated in 1910 in a space that was Denver’s cemetery before becoming Congress Park. The name was changed when water baron Walter Cheesman’s family bought the rights in an effort to varnish his legacy.
The site has fallen into disrepair in what one historian calls “a prime example of the city’s lack of pride in itself.” Phil Goodstein leads tours in which he points out a general lack of attention to the pavilion that he blames on the city’s last parks chief:
“It’s the Kim Bailey legacy of more liquor, less Port-A-Potties. She showed a thorough disdain for the parks,” he says.
Last week was a busy one as people biked and strolled to the pavilion to watch the sun do its thing from 5,378 feet above sea level. On Wednesday, a yoga co-op meditated on the marble floor. On Thursday, the guy in the green shirt was there, as usual, circling his red bike clockwise around the pavilion, and friends Tomas Padilla and Marco Struck discussed life on other planets over bombers of light beer.
“This is the only place where it feels comfortable being your own gay self in Denver,” said Struck, 26, a pavilion regular since spending time in a youth home nearby.
On Friday’s summer solstice, the place was hopping with astronomy buffs and canoodlers, gay men showing off their dance steps and kids in their jammies allowed one night to stay out past their bedtimes. An engineer named Rebecca fighting her second bout with cancer made the three-block walk, albeit breathlessly, to soak up the last sunlight of the year’s longest day.
Even a busy organizer for today’s PrideFest dropped his clipboard to greet the summer and take a quieter kind of pride in their city.
Say what you will about Denver, its scrape-offs and Starbucks after Starbucks after Starbucks. Say what you will about its constant efforts to define and spit-shine its image. But there are few big cities with sunsets like this. And it is rare, anywhere, to find so many urban folk gathered in such silence and solidarity gazing beyond themselves at something far more majestic.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com
