Walk the gravel loop around Washington Park enough times and you stop seeing most of it. The flower beds by the boathouse blur into background. The tennis courts are just tennis courts. But there's a small, low building near the southeast corner, close to Grasmere Lake, that most people walk past without a second look. If you've ever wondered what it is, the honest answer is: a maintenance shed, probably, or some kind of storage building for the parks department.
It isn't. It's the clubhouse of the Washington Park Lawn Bowling Club, and before that, it was a tuberculosis quarantine hut. It was installed on the site in 1925, a year after the club itself formed, and it's been standing there ever since. It is very possibly the oldest structure still doing its original-adjacent job anywhere in the neighborhood, and this year it almost didn't make it to its next chapter.
A Quarantine Ward Became a Clubhouse
The Washington Park Lawn Bowling Club started in 1924, when the city laid out bowling greens on the park's southeast side. The hut that now stores the club's equipment came a year later, repurposed from its earlier life as a place to isolate people with tuberculosis. It's a strange lineage for a building that now mostly holds boxes of bowls and a scoring tower, but Denver doesn't have many structures that have quietly switched jobs like that and kept working for a century.
The green itself has hosted more than one sport over the decades. In 1985, the Denver Croquet Club moved onto the same patch of grass, and the two clubs have shared it since. The Croquet Club describes itself as open to any person regardless of age or skill, which is true of the lawn bowling side too. Neither one requires you to have played before you show up.
The Sport Nobody Expects to Find in a City Park
Lawn bowling looks simple from the sidewalk and turns out to reward a strange amount of patience. Players roll a weighted ball called a bowl toward a smaller target ball, the jack, and the closest bowl scores. Club vice president Steve Maher has described the scoring as closest, next closest, third closest, which means a single strong round can rack up several points at once. The bowls are asymmetrically weighted so they curve as they slow down, which is the part that trips up everyone the first time they try it.
Club president John Tanner opens the shed most Tuesdays around 6 p.m., sets up the lanes, and waits to see who shows up. He's a retired structural engineer who lives close enough to the park that he first noticed the club just by walking past it, the same way most residents do now. Membership has skewed toward people with time on their hands and curiosity to spare. Philip Cloues picked up the sport in China and kept playing after moving to Denver by way of California. Mark Thorpe, who works in mining and is originally from England, said what kept him coming back wasn't the competition so much as getting outside and meeting people.
A recent count put membership around 45, enough to keep the green in reasonable shape but not enough to make anyone comfortable. The club's president has said turnout dipped the following season, which is the ordinary math of an all-volunteer group that depends on dues to cover roughly $4,000 to $5,000 a year in upkeep for the green and the clubhouse. That's not a typo. A century-old piece of Denver Parks infrastructure runs on a budget smaller than a lot of household home improvement projects, funded almost entirely by the people who show up to play.
If you want to see it for yourself, the club offers free lessons most Tuesday evenings, no equipment required. They'll hand you a bowl and let you figure out the curve on your own.
The Shed Almost Didn't Make the Next Hundred Years
Earlier this year, the lawn bowling club, the Denver Croquet Club, and the neighborhood advocacy group Friends and Neighbors of Washington Park ran a matching grant campaign to restore the historic shed. FANS offered to match donations up to $12,500, with each club aiming to raise $6,250 of its own, for a combined goal of $25,000. The point of hitting that number wasn't just cosmetic repair. A stronger fundraising showing improves the odds of securing a History Colorado grant that would fund a full restoration through HistoriCorps, a nonprofit that specializes in hands-on preservation of historic structures on public land.
Sit with that for a second. The building's fate isn't tied to a city capital improvement budget line. It's tied to whether enough neighbors write checks in the same calendar year. That's the actual mechanism holding up a piece of Denver history most residents have never noticed exists.
Meanwhile, Across the Park, City Hall Just Took the Opposite Approach
While one corner of Washington Park runs on volunteer dues and matching grants, another corner just got absorbed directly into city operations. For more than two decades, the pedal boats on Smith Lake were run by a private vendor, Wheel Fun Rentals, under an arrangement where the company paid the city a percentage of revenue instead of flat rent. It was a setup Denver Parks and Recreation described as unusual even among its other park concession deals.
This year, that changed. Denver Parks and Recreation launched a new in-house program called Adventure Hub, which now runs boat and bike rentals directly at both Washington Park and City Park, open spring through fall. The fleet got a refresh in the process. Alongside the familiar swan boats, riders can now pedal around Smith Lake in duck and dragon-shaped boats that debuted for the 2026 season, plus a flamingo design that's joined the rotation. All of them are the same pedal-powered, four-person setup, just wearing different heads.
Same Park, Two Different Ways Something Old Survives
Put those two stories next to each other and you get something more interesting than either one alone. A hundred-year-old shed survives because a retired engineer unlocks it every Tuesday and neighbors pass a matching-grant hat around once a year. A twenty-year-old boat concession just got folded into a city department and came back with a cartoon dragon on the front.
Both are technically amenities of the same 160-acre park. Neither one is guaranteed to look the same way in five years. But the forces keeping them alive couldn't be more different, and knowing which is which tells you something real about how this particular park actually works underneath the parts everyone already knows about, the running loop, the flower beds, the volleyball games on summer weekends. It's also, per one Denver magazine's neighborhood writeup, the kind of park where you might spot Nuggets center Nikola Jokić on an afternoon stroll, which is its own small reminder that Wash Park stays busy in ways that have nothing to do with real estate.
How to Actually Go See Either One
- Free lawn bowling lessons run most Tuesdays around 6 p.m. at the green near Grasmere Lake. No equipment needed, no experience required.
- The Denver Croquet Club shares the same green and is open to any skill level.
- Adventure Hub rentals are open spring through fall at Smith Lake, with swan, duck, dragon, and flamingo pedal boats now in rotation.
None of this requires planning ahead. It requires showing up on the right night, or noticing a building you've walked past a hundred times.
If stories like this are part of why you love this neighborhood, that same curiosity about the small, specific details of a place is exactly what Trish Kelly brings to every conversation about buying or selling near Washington Park. Whether you're weighing a move within the neighborhood or just want a read on what your block is worth these days, it's worth a conversation with someone who already knows which bench by Grasmere Lake gets the best afternoon light. Schedule a free consultation whenever you're ready.
