"On Saturdays and Sundays, you couldn't even walk the streets for so many people being out here," longtime Five Points businessman Norman Harris recalled.

Known as Denver's first suburban neighborhood, Five Points began in the 1800s as an industrial area. Eventually, blacks flocked to the neighborhood because of segregation.

"The housing covenants caused people to live in certain parts of the city. Particularly the low-income minorities," Charleszine Terry Nelson of the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Five Points said.

The neighborhood got its name once streetcars started rolling around Denver. The stop near 26th and Welton Streets had too many streets to name, so the area just became known as Five Points.

Nelson adds that, by the 1930s, Five Points had become a complete community and, as she says, "the gateway to the African American community" in Denver.

Restaurants, medical and law offices, beauty shops and stores soon lined the streets.

Five Points also gained fame for its lively entertainment and jazz scene, making it the only cultural historic district in Colorado.

These days, Five Points is a lot less lively. Many of the businesses on the Welton Street corridor have remained dormant for decades.

But people like Nelson are confident the old Five Points can still return

"There's another movement by youngsters to come back and embrace the land where their parents lived. But it's slow," Nelson said. "It's always sad. But at the same time, we're hopeful."

In celebration of Black History Month, 9NEWS Reporter TaRhonda Thomas and Photojournalist Byron Reed produced a five-part series on the Five Points Neighborhood. You can watch the series all week on 4 O'clock at 9NEWS.