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Five Points’ Sonny Lawson Park is mostly surrounded by metal barricades. Aug. 22, 2024.
Kevin J. Beaty/Denverite
Paradise de Fer had been living in Five Points’ Sonny Lawson Park for just a few days before the city kicked her out.
Officials arrived on Tuesday morning, she said, forced people camping there to leave.
Then they surrounded its grass and basketball court with metal fencing.
“The only reason people are sleeping at the park is that they don’t have nowhere else to go. You’re building apartments right in front of us. What are you telling us? What? We’re not good enough?” she told us Thursday, sitting on the sidewalk outside the fence line. “The park is supposed to be free.”
Officials did the same at La Alma/Lincoln Park, and a few grassy medians near 14th Avenue and Kalamath Street.
Parks and Rec says the green spaces will be closed for about a month. It’s a move they’ve made before
“The closures will last for at least 30 days,” city spokesperson Stephanie Figueroa said in an email. “The decision was made due to the increase in drug sales, violent incidents and vandalism. [Denver Parks and Rec] attempted other interventions before deciding on the closures, but the problem persisted.”
Some sections will remain open, like dog parks and playgrounds — you’ll just need to walk through aisles of barricades to get there.
Events that were already permitted in those spaces, like ballgames and farmers markets, will also be able to carry out their plans if they still want to.
This is not the first time safety has spurred Denver to do this, Figueroa pointed out.
Parks and Rec closed Civic Center Park in 2021 after officials raised concerns about drug use and sales there. It didn’t fully reopen until 2023.
“As you walk the park today, you can witness firsthand how successful that closure and reopening was,” Figueroa said. “The park is in amazing shape and is welcoming to all who want to visit this public space.”
Some neighbors call the move ‘ridiculous,’ while others say the park didn’t always feel safe.
Yes, de Fer said, some people were buying drugs at Sonny Lawson, probably blue fentanyl pills. But she also felt safe there.
“It was a community,” she said.
Adam S., who declined to give his last name, agreed with her from over the fence as he ran his Australian Shepherd in the dog park.
“98 percent of the time it’s perfectly calm. People are chilling. And I think that’s a good thing. That’s community,” he said. “And I think it’s ridiculous that they put a fence around a public park, where it’s for people to come and relax. If me and ten white people came and sat out, you think they’d say anything?”
But Cisco Saenz, who we met exercising on the still-open playground, said he was not upset about seeing the new fencing. He understands that the people who were sleeping here will have to move along, but it didn’t always feel like a safe place.
“You see a lot of people out here, arguing, yelling,” he said. “I’m glad they put them up. I feel like [this place] needed a break.”
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