From the early 1920s, Park Hill was an established neighborhood, one frequently characterized as among Denver’s most desirable places to live. Developers presented the neighborhood not merely as a place to call home, but as a reflection of accomplishment and affluence, and they appealed to the aspirations of prospective homeowners. Similar appeals continued throughout much of the twentieth century. A brochure published in the 1960s to promote the neighborhood captured the appeal: “In Park Hill you can be pardoned for feeling quietly pleased with yourself… just a bit smug.” Park Hill developers also took steps to assure prospective residents that their community would suffer no future decline or the encroachment of whatever, or whomever, they might deem undesirable.

Like other Denver neighborhoods, including Montclair, South Denver, Highlands, and Berkeley, Park Hill developers established restrictive covenants and limited the use and nature of residential neighborhoods and homes. To the west, Jacob W. Downing’s “Downington” included racial restrictions, and by the early twentieth century, Downing Street marked a racial divide between black and white in Denver. Greater Park Hill Community (GPHC) was founded in response to the paranoia that swept Park Hill during the late 1950s when the real estate industry – not just brokers and salesmen but bankers, appraisers, and insurance firms, black as well as white – began a brutal but money-making “Driveout-the-whites and fill-in-the-blocks-with-blacks” push for a racial transition. This system had started in Chicago during World War I and continued afterward, creating ever-expanding minority ghettoes in Milwaukee, Los Angeles, New York, and dozens of other cities nationwide, before arriving in Denver.

Rachel Noel, a Park Hill resident, whose single term on the Denver School Board would see her put in motion events that would forever alter Denver’s public schools. Noel’s 1968 resolution, a call for a plan to integrate Denver’s schools, initially carried the School Board, only to lose support after a subsequent election. That reversal precipitated a lawsuit that eventually saw court-ordered integration.