Within the Five Points Neighborhood, this district of Victorian homes includes Denver's first park (1868), a donation to the city from Sanuel S. Curtis, a developer of the pioneer streetcar suburb, Curtis Park. It is Denver's oldest surviving residential neighborhood, developed in the 1870s. Initially a haven for those with the means to move out of the city, Curtis Park evolved into a black, Hispanic, and Japanese neighborhood during the 1920s and 1930s. The David Crowell House ( DV032.1; 1873; 1977 restoration, Brian Congleton), 2816 Curtis Street, is a small frame cottage and perhaps the oldest structure in the area. Typical of the larger Italianate homes is that of department store founder John Jay Joslin ( DV032.2; 1880), 2915 Champa Street. Since the 1970s the neighborhood has been partly gentrified. The Curtis Park Face Block project restored pedestrian ambiance by reinstalling sandstone sidewalks and street trees. Exterior rehabilitation of forty-three houses in the district won a national AIA Honor Award for preservation architects Gary Long and Kathy Hoeft. They helped rescue two nineteenth-century brick workers' cottages by moving them to the southwest corner of 28th Avenue and Curtis Street, renovating the interiors, and selling them to low-income buyers.
Styles represented within the district include Italianate (2639 Curtis Street), Queen Anne (2663 and 2820 Champa Street), and Carpenter's Gothic (the church at 2501 California Street and houses at 2630 Curtis Street and 2927 Champa Street). Also of note are many eclectic Victorian homes throughout the district, Second Empire designs at 2445 California Street and 2601 Champa Street, and single-story frame cottages at 2913 Curtis Street and 2826 and 2828 Stout Street.
Nearby, along Arapahoe and Lawrence streets, bland blocks of two-story brick town houses of fireproof concrete construction,