Post #35147 by Exoticat on Wed, May 21, 2003 12:04 AM

Dupont Circle: Where Art and Eccentricity Meet
By Sascha Segan
Washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 17, 1997

Dupont Circle radiates art, culture and eccentric vitality.

Openly gay couples celebrate in a raucous summer Gay Pride Parade and a Halloween Drag Race. On sunny spring days, a brass band plays outside the Dupont Circle Metro station and an occasional free-lance horn player sets up on Q Street.

Teenagers with pierced lips and threadbare jackets juggle colorful sticks and huddle in doorways. Twenty- and thirty-somethings fill the sidewalk cafes on 17th Street.

"Behold our glory," laughed David Sherman, a proofreader from Takoma Park who comes to play chess in Dupont Circle "every nice day."

The Circle's original old-money residents might be shocked to see it today. Fabulous mansions were built in this Northwest Washington neighborhood in the 1880s and 1890s. But by the 1940s, the wealthy had moved further north and west and their mansions had devolved into boarding houses for returning war veterans.

Dupont became a bohemian zone, a place for sketch artists and beat poets.

Washington's hippies played their guitars on the Circle's grass in the '60s; attracted by the liberal atmosphere, gay people moved to the neighborhood in droves. By the 1980s, young professionals were added to the mix.

The result today is a social goulash of yuppies, gay and straight; a few young families and long-term residents.