Drive to Cherry Hills Village City Hall to pick up a permit or drop off a form, and you will pass it without meaning to: a terraced lawn sloping down behind the building, a wooden walkway zigzagging through a patch of wetland, two ponds with fishing piers jutting into the water. Most people glance at it the way you glance at any municipal grounds and keep walking toward the door marked "Building Department." Which is a shame, because what sits behind Cherry Hills Village City Hall at 2450 East Quincy Avenue is doing two jobs at once, and neither one is decorative.
The first job is flood control. The second is carrying the name of a nine-year-old boy. Almost nobody who uses the fishing piers on a Tuesday evening knows either.
The Floodway Wearing a Park's Clothes
Before 2019, the ground behind City Hall was, in the words of the landscape architects who redesigned it, dilapidated. It sat within Greenwood Gulch, a regional tributary to Cherry Creek that had never been asked to do much beyond carry stormwater through when it rained hard. The redesign changed that job description. What is now John Meade Park and the adjacent Alan Hutto Memorial Commons was rebuilt as a working floodway, engineered to manage low water flows day to day and absorb regional flooding when it comes, while functioning as an ecologically diverse wetland the rest of the time.
That double duty is why the ponds, the boardwalk, and the planting beds are not simply pretty. They are infrastructure that happens to attract blue herons, snow egrets, and mergansers, according to the design team that built it. The wetland is doing the unglamorous work of moving water safely through a residential campus while giving the birds a reason to stop. If you have ever wondered why a city park has an actual floodway running through it instead of a mowed lawn, that is the answer. Cherry Hills Village needed somewhere for the water to go, and decided the somewhere should also be a place where people bring their kids on a Saturday.
The Name on the Lawn
The Alan Hutto Memorial Commons portion of the site, the terraced amphitheater and performance lawn, exists because of a gift with a story behind it. The land was donated to the city by Frank and Holly Hutto and by Peter and Linda Niederman, in memory of the Huttos' son Alan, who died at nine and a half.
Peter Niederman later told The Villager how the idea started. He and Frank had originally planned to develop the parcel themselves, put a house on it. Then Frank called him with a different idea entirely: "I've got an idea. I'd like to donate this piece of ground."
Niederman said yes on the spot. The two families gave the land instead of building on it, and the city shaped it into a sculpted lawn and performance space that now sits just northeast of John Meade Park, a quiet buffer between the civic campus and the neighborhoods around it. When the site finally held its grand opening on June 26, 2021, delayed nearly a year by the pandemic even though the park had already been open to the public since the previous September, both families were there. So was the mayor. Watching kids run across the grass, Alan's father said this was exactly what he had pictured when he started the project nine years earlier.
That is the part of the story that does not show up on a park map. The next time you sit on that terraced lawn waiting for a community event to start, you are sitting on ground two families chose to give away rather than build on.
What You Can Actually Do There
Strip away the history and the hydrology for a second, because the practical question most residents actually have is simpler: is this worth the stop. It is, and the list is longer than the drive-by view suggests.
- Both ponds have fishing piers, open to residents who want to cast a line after work without driving to a reservoir
- A boardwalk crosses the wetland area, giving you a walking route through the habitat instead of just a view of it from the parking lot
- The play area includes a saucer swing, a hammock, a tree climber, and an observation tower, designed with input from the city's own Parks, Trails, and Recreation Commission
- 125 trees were planted as part of the build, still maturing into the shade they were planted to eventually provide
- The Commons itself is a sculpted, terraced-grass amphitheater built for performances and gatherings, not just a lawn that happens to slope
That last one is worth pausing on, because it is the piece most residents skip past without realizing they are allowed to use it. Alan Hutto Memorial Commons is one of the city's reservable properties. If you want to hold an event there, you file an Event Permit Application with a twenty-five dollar nonrefundable fee, coordinated through Parks and Recreation Coordinator Emily Black. It is not a private lawn attached to a government building. It is a public space built specifically so groups of residents would have somewhere to gather that was not somebody's backyard.
Why Design Juries Across Colorado Took Notice
Here is the part that surprises people who assumed this was just a nicely maintained city park: professionals in the design world do not talk about it that way. Since its completion, the civic campus that includes John Meade Park and the Commons has picked up Project of the Year from the American Public Works Association's Colorado chapter, a President's Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects Colorado, and a Silver award for Meeting the Challenge of a Difficult Job from the Associated General Contractors of Colorado.
Three separate professional bodies, representing public works engineers, design practitioners, and contractors, all singled out the same stretch of ground behind Cherry Hills Village's smallest municipal building. The gap between how residents talk about this park, if they talk about it at all, and how the people who build parks for a living talk about it, is the whole point. One group sees a place to walk the dog on the way back from City Hall. The other sees a solved engineering problem wearing a coat of native plants and a children's play structure.
Both are right. That is what makes it worth a second look rather than a drive-by.
The Next Time You're at City Hall
You do not need a reason to go. The next time you are heading to City Hall anyway, whether it is a permit, a council meeting, or paperwork you have been putting off, give yourself the extra fifteen minutes. Walk the boardwalk. Check the piers. Sit on the terraced lawn for a minute and think about the fact that two families chose to give this ground away instead of building on it, and that a floodway engineer somewhere is quietly satisfied every time it rains hard and nothing floods.
Cherry Hills Village has a habit of building things that do more than one job at a time. This is one of the better examples, and it happens to be free, five minutes from wherever you already live in the Village, and named for a reason worth knowing.
If you're curious what else in Cherry Hills Village rewards a second look, or you're thinking about what it actually takes to buy or sell here, Niki Collier knows this ground the way a fisherman knows which pier to stand on at dusk. Come talk about the neighborhood, not just the listing.
