Qualla: Dupont Circle

Dupont Circle: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Lambda Rising opened on 20th Street in 1974 with a paperback section, a bulletin board, and a coffee pot. The store was the District's first gay bookstore, and within a year it was running the first openly gay-oriented television commercial in the world. The owner, Deacon Maccubbin, took out spots on local stations announcing the store's hours and offering free coffee. The ads were small acts of normalcy. The neighborhood around the bookstore was already becoming one of the most important gay enclaves in America, alongside the Castro in San Francisco, Greenwich Village in New York, and Boystown in Chicago. The traffic circle at the center had been laid out by Pierre L'Enfant in 1791, named for a Civil War admiral in 1882, and remade more times than anyone can fully account for. By the 1970s, it belonged, in many practical and cultural ways, to a community Washington had not previously seen.

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Dupont Circle: Pacific Circle, Then Dupont

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The traffic circle at the intersection of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, P, and 19th Streets was part of Pierre L'Enfant's original 1791 plan for Washington but was not actually built until 1871, when the Army Corps of Engineers laid out the roundabout. It was called ...

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Dupont Circle: Mansions

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between the 1870s and 1900 the broad diagonal avenues converging on Dupont Circle filled with the kind of palatial mansions that Gilded Age fortunes bought. Stewart's Castle, an 1873 confection on the north side, was demolished long ago. The James G. Blaine Mansion of 1882 still ...

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Dupont Circle: Strivers' Section

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The neighborhood west of 16th Street, between Swann Street and Florida Avenue, became known in the late nineteenth century as Strivers' Section. A turn-of-the-century Black writer described the area as a community of Negro aristocracy, and the name stuck. Frederick Douglass owned...

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Dupont Circle: Decline and Bohemian Revival

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

After World War II and especially after the 1968 riots, Dupont declined. Wealth had been moving to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs for decades, and the postwar shift accelerated. Many of the Massachusetts Avenue mansions were divided into apartments or sold to embassies. The ne...

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Dupont Circle: Underground and Above

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The streetcar underpass beneath Dupont Circle, built in 1949 to carry trams on Connecticut Avenue under the traffic on Massachusetts, was closed in 1962 when the District's streetcar system was shut down. The tunnels sat empty for decades before being reopened as the Dupont Under...

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