Chances are you’ve never heard of S.R. DeBoer. Not unless you’ve stopped by the modest south Denver park that bears his name, and you’ve read his brief biography posted on a sign there. In which case you learned of the remarkable role he played in developing the many parks and other cherished public amenities we now regard as central to Denver’s quality of life.

Saco Rienk DeBoer, who died in 1974, was a Dutch-born landscape architect who immigrated to the United States and ultimately to Denver around 1912. He spent decades thereafter designing one beloved park space and civic facility after another, including City Park, Cheesman Park, Washington Park and Civic Center Park. He also played pivotal roles in designing the Denver Botanic Gardens and world-renowned concert venue Red Rocks.

DeBoer also championed a better quality of life for Denverites, including that hallmark of family life – the single-family home. The proverbial “American Dream.” DeBoer felt, as most people do today, that it was the healthiest urban setting in which to raise kids. And he wanted zoning that would let residents enjoy those homes away from the din and pollution of industry and the chaos of commercial development.

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So, Denver City Hall now wants residents to consider repaying DeBoer for all his contributions – by stripping his name from the park. Yes, really.

It turns out single-family homes and the neighborhoods that accommodate them are now considered “exclusionary.” Of whom or what isn’t clear, but it’s enough to cancel DeBoer.

If you can’t connect those dots, neither can we. A name that if anything deserves a far higher profile in the community instead would be erased and banished to permanent obscurity.

It is one of the more bizarre and perverse aftershocks of the “cancel culture” unleashed in the aftermath of George Floyd’s May 2020 death in Minneapolis. And DeBoer isn’t the only Denver park name on the city’s pending blacklist.

In a series of community meetings starting today, the Denver Agency for Human Rights & Community Partnerships is, “engaging the community to hear concerns and points of view that may or may not lead to a process of renaming” DeBoer and five other parks: Jefferson, La Alma-Lincoln, Jefferson Square, Pasquinel’s Landing and Grant Frontier.

Some of those parks’ namesakes are among history’s giants, of course, like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln. Epic figures of Western Civilization, they were mortals who reflected the values of their times – Jefferson was a slaveholder – but changed the world for the better.

Ridiculous talk of expunging their names from public places fortunately has subsided in many quarters if not in Denver.

Yet, it’s the attempt to add nearly forgotten – and completely benign – figures from local history to the ginned-up rogues’ gallery that best illustrates the absurd depths to which the renaming frenzy has sunk. It’s as if they’ve run out of more recognizable targets.

Picking on someone like DeBoer is almost as laughable as it is despicable – though it gets even sillier. Pasquinel’s Landing park is actually named after a fictitious figure from a James Michener historical novel – a European fur trapper married to a Native American woman.

There’ll be none of that, apparently.

It all makes you wonder if the Agency for Human Rights & Community Partnerships – with its $7.5 million 2023 budget – has too much time, and tax dollars, on its hands.

The agency’s meeting on S.R. DeBoer Park begins today at 5:30 p.m. at University Park Elementary School, 2300 S. St Paul St. Show up – and tell them you want your money back.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board