Highland

Ask five people where Highland starts and ends and you will get five different answers. The name has been used loosely for decades to cover West Highland, LoHi, Jefferson Park and Sunnyside along with the neighborhood it actually names. This page is about the real one: the town platted in 1858, incorporated on its own in 1875, and annexed into Denver in 1896. It sits between W 38th Avenue, the Union Pacific rail line, Speer Boulevard and Federal Boulevard, north of LoHi, east of West Highland, and above Jefferson Park.

The original town of Highlands

William Larimer Jr., who founded Denver City across the river, staked this townsite in 1858. The Highland Town Company formed the following year, and the settlement grew independently of Denver for decades. It incorporated as the Town of Highlands in 1875 and reached city status in 1885. By 1896, keeping up its own water system and services no longer made sense next door to a much larger neighbor, so residents voted to annex into Denver.

That 19th-century town center survives today as the Potter Highlands Historic District: roughly 36 blocks of brick Victorians built between the 1880s and 1890s, protected by Denver landmark status. It is one of the best-preserved pockets of that era anywhere in the city, and it is the reason people who care about the history buy here specifically instead of in West Highland or LoHi.

The rest of the neighborhood fills in around it with a mix of original bungalows, updated Victorians and newer infill, all within a few blocks of the W 32nd Avenue corridor that runs the length of Highland. An I-25 pedestrian bridge puts downtown and Union Station within a ten-minute ride, which is part of why Highland shows up on so many relocation shortlists without ever getting the attention West Highland or LoHi get.