Clusters of dark red and deep purple wild chokecherries hanging centrally above a rustic wooden counter next to a jar of preserve in a brightly lit boutique pantry store.

Cherry Creek Denver: What to Know While You Shop the District

Published 29 Sep 20268 min read

Cherry Creek is named for cherries. Just probably not the cherries you are picturing.

If you are spending a Saturday here, the modern references are unavoidable: Cherry Creek Shopping Center, Cherry Creek North, Cherry Creek Drive, Cherry Creek Trail. The name has become so completely attached to the neighborhood that it is easy to stop hearing the words themselves.

But there is an actual creek. And the cherries were real.

They were not the glossy Bings and Rainiers stacked in grocery stores every summer. They were chokecherries, Prunus virginiana, a native shrub or small tree that favors streambanks and other places where water gathers. The fruit grows in clusters, each cherry much smaller than the supermarket kind, turning from red toward deep purple or nearly black as it ripens. Even ripe, it can carry enough tannic astringency to explain the slightly alarming English name.

Chokecherries were food nonetheless. Indigenous peoples across the Plains gathered them, dried them, cooked them and preserved them, including in preparations meant to last through winter. They became syrups, jellies and wine in later kitchens. Long before anyone could buy lunch or groceries in Cherry Creek, food was already growing along its banks.

That is the first useful thing to know while spending an afternoon here. Cherry Creek may present itself as one of Denver's most polished neighborhoods, but almost everything about it makes more sense once you look underneath.

The little creek beside the mall runs to the place Denver began

You do not need to walk the Cherry Creek Trail to understand the geography. Just notice the water sometime while you are here.

Follow it west in your mind.

Cherry Creek runs toward downtown until it reaches the South Platte River at the confluence. Today there is a park there. In 1858, there were prospectors.

William Greenberry Russell's party worked around the confluence during the first stirrings of the Colorado gold rush. Flecks of gold helped turn rumor into migration. The rush that followed brought an estimated 100,000 people into Colorado between 1858 and 1860, and settlements sprang up around the meeting of the two waterways.

Auraria appeared on one side. Denver City rose on the other. Claims were made, streets were surveyed, businesses opened and fortunes were pursued with varying degrees of success. The settlements eventually became part of the city we know now.

Denver therefore has a strangely intimate relationship with the little waterway that gives this shopping district its name. The city was not founded around a deep harbor or a great navigable river. One of the decisive places in its origin story is downstream from here, where prospectors peered into the water and thought they saw a future.

Stand near the creek today and this can be difficult to reconcile. In places it seems almost incidental to the city built around it.

Denver learned more than once not to mistake small for harmless.

The creek once arrived downtown fifteen feet high

Flooding was part of Cherry Creek's reputation almost from the beginning. One early flood tore through the young city, killed as many as twenty people and caused roughly a million dollars in damage when Denver itself was still new.

Then came 1933.

Forty miles southeast of Denver stood Castlewood Dam. Completed in 1890, the masonry-and-rock-fill structure was about 600 feet long and 70 feet high. Its reservoir stored irrigation water for the farms beyond the city: dairy country, potato fields and orchards.

On August 2, 1933, an extraordinary localized storm hit the watershed above it. Depending on where the rain was measured, roughly four to nine inches fell in about three hours. Water rushed into the reservoir. Its level rose by about six feet in 45 minutes.

Around midnight, water began overtopping the dam.

Early the next morning, Castlewood failed.

The initial discharge below the breach has been estimated at 126,000 cubic feet of water per second. The flood began moving north through the canyon toward Denver.

This is where the story becomes less about hydrology than people.

The dam tender, Hugh Paine, got word of the failure out. The warning eventually reached Denver police and the telephone network. Nettie Driskill, a telephone operator working that night, began calling households along Cherry Creek and telling people to get to higher ground.

Think about the mechanics of that for a moment.

A dam had failed miles away in the darkness. A destructive flood was moving toward a city that was largely asleep. There were no emergency alerts appearing simultaneously on thousands of phones. Someone had to learn what had happened. Someone had to make a call. Someone else had to make another.

About 5,000 people are estimated to have left the lowlands before the flood reached them.

The water arrived at the edge of Denver around dawn and reached downtown by roughly seven in the morning. Two major waves were reported. The larger approached fifteen feet in height. Denver Water's chief engineer later estimated that approximately 1.5 billion gallons passed through the city in six hours.

Two people died.

Given what was moving downstream, the smallness of that number is part of what makes the story so remarkable.

People warned people.

The calm water you see today is not entirely natural

Cherry Creek now looks so domesticated that its history can sound implausible.

That is partly because Denver eventually built something large enough to change the relationship.

Cherry Creek Dam was completed around 1950 upstream of the city. The earth-fill embankment is roughly 14,300 feet long, close to three miles, and reaches about 140 feet at its highest point. Its primary purpose was simple: reduce the risk that catastrophic water would again come racing down Cherry Creek into Denver.

When the South Platte basin suffered disastrous flooding in 1965, Cherry Creek Dam held.

So when you glimpse the narrow creek during a weekend in the district, its calm should not be mistaken for evidence that it has always behaved this way. What looks like an unremarkable urban stream is partly the result of an enormous piece of flood-control infrastructure sitting miles away.

The calm is engineered.

Cherry Creek North was once another town

Now look away from the water and toward the streets.

Cherry Creek did not simply grow outward from downtown in one uninterrupted wave. Part of the neighborhood began with an identity of its own.

Harman was laid out in the 1880s and incorporated as a town in 1886. It occupied land east of the early city, in territory that now forms part of the Cherry Creek area. For a time, someone standing in Harman was not standing in Denver.

Eventually Denver absorbed it.

The old municipal boundary has vanished from everyday life, but the fact is worth carrying around as you browse Cherry Creek North. These blocks that now feel inseparable from central Denver once belonged to a separate town on its edge.

That is a recurring Cherry Creek trick. Almost every polished layer has another one beneath it.

And the mall rose from one of the least glamorous pieces of ground in Denver

The transformation south of First Avenue is even stranger.

Architect and developer Temple Hoyne Buell acquired land near the creek in the 1920s. Parts of it had been scarred by gravel pits. Low ground near the creek carried the obvious problem of flooding. The 1933 disaster made that problem impossible to ignore.

For a period, some of the property became a city garbage dump.

Now stand there mentally for a second: flood-prone ground, gravel pits, garbage.

Then look at Cherry Creek today.

After the war, with the threat of catastrophic flooding being brought under greater control, Buell pursued an entirely different future for the land. He announced plans for a shopping center in the 1940s. Ground was broken around 1950. Denver Dry opened there in 1953, and the larger center followed.

What emerged would be redeveloped and enlarged repeatedly over the decades, eventually becoming the Cherry Creek Shopping Center familiar today.

It is hard to imagine a more complete reversal in urban value. Land that had been difficult to use because water could destroy what was built there became some of the most intensely commercial real estate in Colorado.

And across First Avenue, Cherry Creek North developed its own commercial personality: smaller blocks, storefronts facing sidewalks, restaurants, galleries, boutiques and businesses packed into sixteen walkable blocks.

The district now feels inevitable.

It was anything but.

What to notice while you are here

None of this requires turning a weekend in Cherry Creek into a history tour.

Go shopping. Have lunch. Get coffee. Walk into the store whose window catches you. Cross First Avenue because something on the other side looks interesting. Spend twenty minutes somewhere you had not intended to enter.

Just carry the older neighborhood with you.

When you see the words Cherry Creek, do not picture a bowl of supermarket cherries. Picture dark little chokecherries hanging in clusters along a streambank.

When you glimpse the creek, remember that the same waterway runs west toward the place where Denver's founding settlements took shape.

When it looks harmless, remember Castlewood.

When it looks controlled, remember that it is.

When the mall feels like some permanent monument to retail, remember the gravel pits, floodwater and garbage dump.

And when Cherry Creek North feels completely embedded in Denver, remember Harman.

A neighborhood becomes more interesting once its present stops looking inevitable.

Then come find us on Josephine Street

The Ambrosian Pantry is at 263 Josephine Street, in the middle of all of this.

There is something satisfying about running a food shop in a district whose name reaches back to a wild fruit growing beside the water. We will not pretend there was some grand historical plan leading from chokecherries to shelves of tea, chocolate, preserves, spices and tinned fish. Cities are rarely that tidy.

But the connection is difficult not to enjoy.

Arapaho and Cheyenne people knew an edible landscape here. Prospectors followed the creek toward gold. Water shaped where Denver could safely build. Engineers restrained it. A separate town became a neighborhood. Floodplain and discarded land became a shopping district. Generations of merchants have since filled these blocks with reasons for people to come, look, eat, buy and linger.

We are one small part of the latest version.

If your Saturday in Cherry Creek eventually brings you through our door, come in and wander. No historical reenactment required.

But the next time someone says they are heading to Cherry Creek, you will at least know which cherries they mean.

If the afternoon sends you home wanting to cook, our guide to the Denver pantry looks at what belongs in a Colorado kitchen, while our guide to cooking at altitude explains why familiar recipes can behave differently at 5,280 feet. During the holidays, our Cherry Creek gift guide takes over from there.