Paddle a flamingo-shaped boat around Smith Lake this August and you're riding the tail end of a story most people never noticed happening. A year ago, that boat would have been a swan, and it would have belonged to a Denver teacher named Josh Catron. Today it belongs to the City and County of Denver, and the business Catron spent seven years building is gone from the park entirely.
The handoff didn't come with a ribbon cutting. It came with an October 2025 non-renewal notice, a February deadline to clear equipment out of city storage, and a Facebook Marketplace listing for used paddle boats and surrey bikes. It's one of at least three operator changes to hit Washington Park in the past year, and once you see them together, they explain something the park's calm surface doesn't: 2026 is the year the city renegotiated who runs the pieces of Wash Park that don't show up on a map.
Two Historic Buildings, Two Separate Landlord Problems
Smith Lake has two structures that longtime residents tend to mix up, and this year's news makes the distinction worth knowing. The Boathouse sits on the lake's south shore, a 1913 Jules Jacques Benois Benedict design used for boat storage and private event rentals. The Dos Chappell Bathhouse sits at the north end, built in 1911 as a swimming changing house and now serving as headquarters for Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, the nonprofit that has run out of the building for nearly three decades.
Both structures are currently the subject of city decisions that caught their longtime occupants off guard. The boat rental concession and the bathhouse lease are administratively unrelated, run through different city contracts, but both ended up in front of Denver City Council this year for the same underlying reason: Denver Parks and Recreation is pulling operations that used to sit with independent tenants back under direct city control.
The Swan Boats Went First
Wheel Fun Rentals operated bikes and swan boats at Washington Park and City Park for 21 years under a series of three to five year city contracts. Catron joined the business seven years ago as a side gig to supplement his teaching income and officially took over as majority owner in 2025, the same year he learned his contract wouldn't survive.
Denver Parks and Recreation notified Catron in October 2025 that his agreement would not be renewed. He proposed a new arrangement to keep operating. The city took months to respond, then told him he had roughly a month to evict. By mid-February 2026, he was clearing storage of nearly four dozen swan boats and dozens of bikes, some of which he ended up selling on Facebook Marketplace because the city declined to buy the equipment outright.
"They saw the idea. They let us do all the hard work to figure out what works and what doesn't work. And then they're like, Okay, we'll just do it."
That's Catron, describing what it felt like to watch the city launch its own rental program using the model he'd spent two decades refining, right down to new dragon, duck, and flamingo pedal boats added to the swan fleet already on Smith Lake. Parks and Rec director Jolon Clark defended the move to council as a matter of keeping revenue in house rather than paying a private operator's cut, telling reporters the change lets the department reinvest that money into services with broader community benefit. Catron's math tells a different story: he says the business brought in under $500,000 a year and had paid the city roughly $700,000 in rent and $500,000 in sales tax over two decades, all without any capital investment from the city in return.
The Bathhouse Lease Runs Out Next
If the boat rentals were the fast version of this story, the Dos Chappell Bathhouse is the slow one. Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado sank nearly a million dollars into restoring the building in the 1990s in exchange for a 30 year lease, and its trail crew built and has maintained the path that circles Smith Lake ever since. VOC executive director Chris Nesset points to that trail as the kind of tangible, everyday contribution that's easy to take for granted until the organization that built it is no longer around to maintain it.
That lease is now running out, and the city has only agreed to a short-term extension through the end of 2027. Parks and Rec spokesperson Stephanie Figueroa told Westword that the department wants the building to serve the park and its users more directly going forward, though no decision on a future use has been made. At a council hearing this past spring, Councilmember Gilmore pressed the department on both the bathhouse and the boat rentals in the same breath, treating them as one pattern rather than two isolated decisions. For residents who've watched VOC volunteers work the Smith Lake trail for years, the open question of what replaces them by 2027 is the kind of thing you notice on your next walk, not in a headline.
The Corner Restaurant Didn't Survive The Handoff Either
The most visible change sits two blocks from the lake, on Old South Gaylord. Wash Park Grille served the neighborhood for nearly three decades before it closed for good in early 2025 following a city tax seizure and an ownership dispute that its final owner, Jeff Estey, summed up to BusinessDen simply: he was done, and had to liquidate everything.
New owners Aaron Grant and Kris Johnson bought the building at 1096 S. Gaylord for $6 million in October 2025 and brought in Bart Hickey, a hospitality veteran with over two decades running high-end concepts like The Capital Grille and Seasons 52, to reopen it as Wash Park Social. The team put roughly $1 to $1.5 million into a remodel that added booths and a horseshoe bar, and built a menu that leans mostly toward familiar comfort food with a smaller share of adventurous plates like grilled octopus, alongside a drink list that name-checks local producers Rebel Bread and Laws Whiskey House. The restaurant opened in late April 2026.
A second concept in the same building was announced under one name and opened under another, a small but telling sign of how fast the plans moved: early coverage in October 2025 called it Taco Garage, while reporting closer to the opening referred to the same roughly 700 square foot taco and margarita spot as Provecho's. Whatever residents end up calling it out loud, it's the second piece of a corner that spent over a year sitting empty after decades of continuous ownership.
What Changed On Wash Park's Ledger In 2026
| What | Who Ran It Before | Who Runs It Now |
|---|---|---|
| Boat and bike rentals at Smith Lake | Wheel Fun Rentals, 21 years | Denver Parks and Recreation, direct operation |
| Dos Chappell Bathhouse | Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, nearly 30 years | Short-term city lease through end of 2027, future use undecided |
| 1096 S. Gaylord St. | Wash Park Grille, nearly 3 decades | Wash Park Social, opened April 2026 |
The One Thing That Didn't Change Hands
Not everything at Washington Park is up for renegotiation this year. The Mount Vernon Garden, the one-acre formal garden at the edge of Grasmere Lake modeled on the garden at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate in Virginia, turned 100 years old in 2026. Landscape architect Saco DeBoer laid it out in 1926, and it's actually the younger of the park's two great formal gardens. The Perennial Garden, also a DeBoer design and known locally as the Big Garden, was laid out in the late 1910s and has been in the ground even longer.
Both gardens are still tended by the same kind of long-running, unpaid stewardship that the boat rentals and the bathhouse lost this year. Horticulturist Jane Packard has spent her tenure reworking the Mount Vernon Garden's beds with prairie plants suited to Denver's dry climate, and in late July, she and Friends and Neighbors of Washington Park marked the garden's centennial with a public garden party. FANS board president Bonnie Sutherland opened the gathering with a tribute to the park and the people who've cared for it, and horticulturist Skyler Smith, who tends the neighboring Big Garden, came out to celebrate too. No contract changed hands. No eviction notice arrived. The same volunteers who've kept these beds alive for years are still the ones doing it.
What This Means For Your Next Walk Around The Lake
Put the four stories side by side and a pattern comes into focus that no single headline captures on its own: Denver Parks and Recreation spent 2026 consolidating control over the park's paid recreation and building-lease relationships, while the park's oldest, entirely volunteer-run institutions kept running exactly as they always have. The swan boats, the bathhouse, and the restaurant on the corner all changed hands on the city's or a buyer's timeline, not the operator's. The gardens didn't change hands at all, because there was never a lease to renegotiate in the first place.
None of this changes what the park looks like from a picnic blanket. It changes who you're actually dealing with the next time you rent a pedal boat, wonder who's minding the Dos Chappell Bathhouse, or wait for a table at the restaurant that used to be the Grille. Washington Park hasn't gotten smaller or less itself. It's just being run, this year, by fewer of the people who built it.
If you're watching this stretch of Denver closely for reasons that go beyond an afternoon at the lake, Kelli Barton Real Estate tracks these shifts as part of daily coverage of the neighborhoods it works in. Sign up to receive exclusive listings in your inbox and stay ahead of what's changing next.
