I biked to the Cheesman Park Art Fest this past weekend from my condo across the street from the University of Denver. This festival started out kind of small back in 2014, which I remember attending when I was working as the bookkeeper at the nearby Tattered Cover Bookstore on East Colfax. I was amazed at the time how many employees of that store I ran into that day. Since then, the festival has grown to a fairly large event. The setting in the park makes it very pleasant for strolling around and looking at the art, and it is very well attended, although Saturday afternoon, unlike in 2014, I did not run into a single person I knew.
Cheesman Park and the nearby Denver Botanic Gardens were once a cemetery, but the City Fathers decided to move the graves so that the city would have a park and gardens for its growing population. Unfortunately, they decided to pay the person they hired to do this by the coffin, and that enterprising individual realized that he could greatly increase his profit by cutting up bodies and spreading the remains among multiple coffins. When Denver officials discovered this, the contractor was fired, but work was halted, and a lot of bodies still remain there, which is why the place is reputed to be haunted. It is said that there are a lot of ghosts that wander the grounds at night, going to pieces about the whole thing.
The festival attracts a wide variety of people to view the art, listen to the musical acts, and partake of the food trucks. And the artwork was pretty good this year, although the photography booths seemed to be limited mostly to Colorado landscapes and a style I refer to as "just plain weird" - skiers on the top of giant rolls of toilet paper, golfers on top of a huge golf ball, and things like that. Still, it was definitely worth visiting, especially when biking through Denver's many parks and green spaces on a beautiful sunny day.
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