Ask a visitor what LoHi is and you'll get the same answer every time: walk 32nd Avenue from Zuni to Julian, eat something Michelin-adjacent, watch the sunset from a rooftop with the skyline behind you. That description isn't wrong. It's also not where most of the neighborhood spends its Sunday mornings.
Head a few more blocks west on that same street, past Julian, past Irving, and the character of 32nd Avenue changes. The rooftop bars thin out. A farmers market sets up folding tables at the corner of Lowell Boulevard. Dogs outnumber tourists. This stretch has a name too, Highland Square, and it runs on a completely different clock than the blocks closer to the river.
If you live here, you already sense this split even if you've never put a name to it. The guidebooks keep writing about one 32nd Avenue. You're actually living on two.
Two Streets, One Name
Lower Highland, the LoHi part of the name, sits closest to downtown, dropped into place by the pedestrian bridge at 16th Street that crosses the South Platte. That bridge puts you in the neighborhood in about ten minutes on foot from Union Station, which is exactly why the blocks around it read as a destination. Little Man Ice Cream has been scooping out of its 28-foot steel milk can at 2620 16th Street since 2008, and the line still wraps the building on warm evenings. Linger occupies a converted mortuary a few blocks up, its rooftop patio built around a 1975 GMC RV turned into a bar. Root Down runs its kitchen on wind power, and its weekend brunch remains one of the hardest reservations to land in LoHi. This is the LoHi that shows up in every "best of Denver" list, and it earns the attention.
Highland Square is a different kind of center. It's not trying to be a destination. It's the neighborhood's actual commons, the place where the weekly errands and the once-a-year gathering both happen, and neither one is aimed at anyone visiting from out of town.
The Sunday That Actually Belongs to You
From May 10 through October 25 this year, Highland Square hosts the 32nd Avenue Farmers Market every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the intersection of 32nd and Lowell. It's a modest footprint by farmers market standards, a scatter of tents selling produce, pierogi, and pretzels, live music playing to whoever's sitting on the curb. There's no ticket, no line management, no reservation window that fills three weeks out. You show up, you buy vegetables from someone who grew them, and you walk your dog around the block while the market packs up.
That's the tell. LoHi's restaurant corridor is built for people arriving from somewhere else. Highland Square's Sunday market is built for people who already live within walking distance and are going to be there next Sunday too.
One Saturday a Year, the Whole Street Closes
The neighborhood's one big annual gathering also happens on this end of the street. The Highlands Street Fair takes over W. 32nd Avenue between Perry and Irving for a single Saturday in June, and this year's fair landed on June 20th, running 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Live sets from local acts including The Tracers, Cass Clayton Band, and Borrowed Feathers filled the afternoon, and close to 100 vendors lined the street selling art, crafts, and food. It's the kind of event that only makes sense as something a neighborhood does for itself. Nobody flies in for the Highlands Street Fair. You go because it's four blocks from your house and it happens once a year.
If you missed it this summer, it comes back every June, and the farmers market fills the gap on every Sunday between now and late October.
What's Actually New, and Which End It's On
The corridor keeps adding to itself, and where a new spot lands tells you which audience it's built for. Down toward the river, chef Johnny Curiel opened Mezcaleria Alma right beside his original Alma Fonda Fina, extending his CDMX-inspired menu into a full mezcal and spirits program aimed at exactly the kind of evening-out crowd that fills LoHi's rooftops. The Hampton Social, a coastal-leaning restaurant and bar with a skyline-view patio, landed in the same stretch. Both are excellent additions. Both are also built for people making a reservation, not people walking home from work.
Further out toward Highland Square, the newest name is Nana's, a recent arrival serving handmade dumplings and Xiao Long Bao that's become one of the more talked-about additions to the West Highland food scene. It's the kind of spot that gets discovered by neighbors first, word of mouth carrying it before any list does. That's the pattern on this end of 32nd: the good stuff tends to arrive quietly and get claimed by the block before anyone writes it up.
The Street Ties It Together, Even If the Two Halves Don't Match
None of this means LoHi and Highland Square are separate neighborhoods pretending to be one. They share a street, a name, and plenty of residents who move easily between both ends depending on the night. The point is narrower: if every list you've read treats 32nd Avenue as one continuous strip of restaurants running from the bridge to Julian, you've been handed the visitor's map. The resident's map has a second half, and it's built around a folding-table farmers market and one Saturday a year when the street closes for a fair with a cover band and a kids' zone.
Walk the whole length of it sometime, from the bridge at 16th down past Little Man's milk can, past Linger and Root Down, and keep going until the rooftop bars give way to the market tents at Lowell. That walk is the actual shape of the neighborhood. Most guides only cover half of it.
For those who live along this stretch, or are thinking about which end of it fits how you actually spend a Sunday, Helm Weaver Helm knows both halves of 32nd Avenue well enough to tell you which one you'd actually use. If a conversation about the neighborhood, the market, or what's changing on the block would be useful, book an appointment and we'll talk it through.
