Editor’s note: This is part of The Know’s series, Staff Favorites. Each week, we give our opinions on the best that Colorado has to offer for dining, shopping, entertainment, outdoor activities and more. (We’ll also let you in on some hidden gems.)
The tombs bear names that still haunt Denver’s history, unmoved by neglect in this out-of-the-way graveyard on the city’s northeast border.
A visit to the 149-year-old Riverside Cemetery shows headstones and mausoleums whose specters loom large — namesakes of mountains and boulevards and opera houses, but also political villains and wealthy mining families with tragic pasts. They stopped moving long ago, unlike the ribbon of South Platte River that gave the cemetery its name.
Riverside’s limestone, marble and bronze monuments are shockingly naked in its largely treeless, 77-acre expanse. And perhaps that’s appropriate, as contemporary history continues to see some of them as outright monsters. Others are culturally diverse pioneers who paved the way for Denver’s progressive present — and who have been criminally forgotten by most.
I visit all of them, but it’s not just morbid tourism. I commune with my relatives’ gravesites wherever they may be, and have found peace there. Instead of grim and solemn, I feel connected and calmed. And when the permanent residents have a wild history like Riverside’s? I’m there for sure.
The estimated 67,000 graves and crypts at Riverside include Clara Brown, Augusta Tabor, Miguel Otero, Barney and Julia Ford, Captain Silas Soule and Gov. John Evans, “as well as 1,200 Civil War veterans and three Medal of Honor recipients,” according to the Fairmount Heritage Foundation, which manages a cemetery that insanely lost its water rights decades ago.
Now it’s a unique historical wasteland, despite the volunteer efforts to tend to it. The view is lovely if you enjoy rusting train tracks and light-rail blare and “Blade Runner”-esque smokestacks. The important — at times horrific — history feels of apiece. Gov. Evans, for example, presided over the Sand Creek Massacre in 1864 that killed hundreds of Indigenous people, mostly women, children and the elderly.
But there are also suffragettes and railroad-builders and heroes like Park Hee Byung, whose early 20th-century efforts to organize Korean culture in Colorado unceremoniously netted him an unmarked grave, according to Fairmount. (That was fixed in 2007, thankfully.)
Riverside ultimately includes not just luminaries but also “the unknown and unwanted, and all those in between,” as History Colorado writes. There’s the Greek Orthodox section (St. Michael’s Plot), and the tidy rows of Civil War graves, where my mother-in-law and my family have placed miniature American flags on past Memorial Days (her idea, and a good one).
Riverside has nearly everything going against it. But it’s outlasted enough boom-and-bust to take on its own motley character. And, yes: It’s straight-up spooky. Years later, my son still hasn’t forgiven me for telling him I spied a moving silhouette inside an echoing mausoleum.
“Oh my God, what’s that in there?” I said as I pointed, and his eyes followed.
“Not funny, Dad!” But as my son learned, and as I continue to appreciate, it’s nicer to visit than live there.
Riverside Cemetery is located at 5201 Brighton Blvd. in Denver and open 8 a.m.-5 p.m. daily. Visit fairmountheritagefoundation.org for information about walking tours, free educational programs and efforts to create an environmentally sustainable landscape there.