Dupont Circle, DC: The Fountain, Embassy Row & the Neighborhood Locals Love

Most DC circles are things you drive around and curse at. Dupont is the rare one people actually sit in. The park at the center — where Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire Avenues all crash into P and 19th Streets — is the neighborhood's living room, and on any decent-weather day it's full: chess hustlers hunched over the stone tables on the south side, people reading on the fountain rim, dogs, protesters, buskers, and someone always eating lunch on the grass.

The fountain in the middle is worth a real look. The original 1884 memorial here was a bronze statue of Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, a Civil War naval officer; his family thought it wasn't grand enough, had it shipped off to Wilmington in 1917, and commissioned the white marble double-tiered fountain that stands today. It was designed by sculptor Daniel Chester French — the man who did the seated Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial — with architect Henry Bacon, and dedicated in 1921. The three carved figures around the central shaft represent the sea, the wind, and the stars. It's one of the best pieces of public art in the city that nobody makes a special trip for.

If you only have an hour, use the fountain as your start and finish. Walk north on Connecticut Avenue for a quick bookstore stop at Kramers, cut west along Q Street toward the Phillips Collection, then return by Massachusetts Avenue so you catch the first stretch of Embassy Row. It is compact, easy to follow, and gives you the park, the neighborhood's commercial spine, rowhouses, and mansion architecture without turning the afternoon into a forced march.

With two or three hours, add the Phillips Collection or the free Anderson House tour rather than trying to do both. The Phillips is the stronger pick for art; Anderson House is the sleeper choice for architecture and decorative interiors. Check current admission and tour times before building your route around either one.

Walk northwest up Massachusetts Avenue from the circle and you're on Embassy Row, where roughly the stretch toward Observatory Circle is lined with dozens of foreign embassies, many of them housed in the enormous Beaux-Arts mansions that DC's wealthiest families built here during the Gilded Age. When the income tax and the Depression made those houses impossible to keep, foreign governments bought them — which is why you can walk one block and pass flags from four continents.

Two of those mansions are open to you. The Phillips Collection, at 21st and Q, was the private home of Duncan and Marjorie Phillips and opened in 1921 as America's first museum of modern art — its crown jewel is Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, and the intimate house setting beats any blockbuster museum for actually looking at paintings. General admission runs about $20 for adults (seniors, students, and military discounted; 18 and under free), it's open Tuesday through Sunday, roughly 10 to 5, and there's pay-what-you-wish admission in the last stretch of the afternoon — check the Phillips site for current hours and prices before you go. The Anderson House on Massachusetts, a jaw-dropping 1905 mansion that's the headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati, is free and one of DC's most underrated tours.

The Sunday FRESHFARM farmers market is the neighborhood ritual. It runs year-round, rain or shine, on 20th Street NW just off the circle between Q Street and Massachusetts Avenue, Sunday mornings (roughly 8:30 to 1:30, with slightly later winter hours — it's a producer-only market, so everything is grown or made by the vendor). Get there early for the good bread and to beat the crowd, then walk your haul through the circle.

Kramers — the bookstore-plus-bar-plus-restaurant at 1517 Connecticut Avenue that generations of Washingtonians still call Kramerbooks — is the other anchor, open late, good for a browse and a drink or brunch in the same trip. Beyond those two, the neighborhood is dense with the stuff of a good afternoon: independent coffee shops, the wine-and-cheese kind of restaurants, Kalorama's quiet embassy-lined streets just north, and Dupont Underground, a volunteer-run arts space in the old trolley tunnels literally beneath the circle that hosts rotating exhibitions and performances (check their current schedule — programming is seasonal).

This is the easy one: Dupont Circle has its own Metro station on the Red Line, right at the circle, which makes it one of the most convenient neighborhoods in the city to reach. There are two entrances — the south one at 19th Street and the north one up at Q Street NW. The Q Street escalators are famous for being some of the longest in the system (188 feet), so if you're coming up that way, stand right and let people pass on the left.

Above ground, Dupont is one of DC's best walking neighborhoods — flat, dense, and close to Georgetown (about a 15-minute walk west), Logan Circle, and the U Street corridor. Capital Bikeshare docks are everywhere. Driving and parking here is the usual DC headache; you won't need a car. For the citywide basics, see Getting Around DC.