Qualla: Scott Circle

Scott Circle: Introduction

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 4.0. Scott Circle is not, and has never been, a circle. On Pierre L'Enfant's 1791 plan it was a rectangle. The Ellicott revision made it a bigger rectangle. By the late 1870s the city had started calling it a circle anyway - Scott Square became Scott Circle without anyone bothering to make the geometry honest - and the shape on the ground today is a bow tie of pavement straddling the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue, Rhode Island Avenue, and 16th Street NW. The central ellipse, ringed by an actual roundabout, has been pedestrian-impossible to reach since 1941, when a tunnel for 16th Street was dug straight through underneath. The general it is named for, Winfield Scott, sits on a bronze horse in the middle of the inaccessible ellipse, facing south down 16th Street toward the White House he once expected to occupy.

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Scott Circle: Jamaica

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before Scott, the patch of ground at the high end of Sixteenth Street was called Jamaica. Nobody quite knows why. A small stream called Slash Run cut through it, a tributary of Rock Creek that drained the slopes between Dupont Circle and Logan Circle before disappearing into the ...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 4.0

Scott Circle: Why It Is Called Scott

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit dbking, CC BY 2.0. Winfield Scott was the most decorated American general between Washington and Grant - he commanded U.S. forces in the Mexican War, devised the Anaconda Plan that ultimately won the Civil War for the Union, and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1852. Henry Kirke Brown sculpted h...

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Image: dbking | CC BY 2.0

Scott Circle: The 16th Street Underpass

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 3.0. By 1940, when the city completed an underpass at Thomas Circle just to the south, Scott Circle had become 'one of the worst remaining traffic bottlenecks in the city.' The square's residents had largely moved out and been replaced by embassies, professional associations, and apar...

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Image: AgnosticPreachersKid | CC BY-SA 3.0

Scott Circle: The Bow Tie

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AgnosticPreachersKid, CC BY-SA 4.0. The shape that resulted is not what anyone would draw on a planning map today. The central ellipse, holding Scott on his horse, is surrounded on all sides by traffic and has no pedestrian crossings. To its east, a triangle of land between Massachusetts Avenue and Rhode Island Ave...

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Image: AgnosticPreachersKid | CC BY-SA 4.0

Scott Circle: Embassy Row Begins Here

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit APK, CC BY-SA 4.0. Scott Circle marks the eastern start of Embassy Row, the stretch of Massachusetts Avenue running northwest toward the Naval Observatory that became the diplomatic spine of Washington in the mid-twentieth century. The Peruvian Embassy that occupied the Windom House was torn down i...

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Image: APK | CC BY-SA 4.0