In a city bejeweled with fountains whose spouts often run dry, one water feature was flowing afresh this week in Dupont Circle. As temperatures rose into the 80s, visitors and residents delighted in the sparkling rush of cool, clear, D.C. Water-treated H2O.
Some took notice right away. Others didn’t — but were pleased once it caught their eye.
“I’m so happy,” said Catherine Butterworth, an international development consultant who has lived near the circle for 15 years. “It feels like springtime again.”
Butterworth thought that fountains such as Dupont Circle’s were needed to make the District a great city to live in. She’d read somewhere that humans are comforted by the sound of water.
“I just wish my allergies would go away,” she said.
Tracy Oginni, a certified nursing assistant and Washington native, sat down for lunch on one of the benches that ring the circle. She hadn’t noticed that the fountain was running until a visitor pointed it out — perhaps because she was used to it being off, she said.
“I didn’t ever think to look over there,” she said.
National Park Service spokesman Mike Litterst said in an email that the fountain came back online Monday after a restoration that cost around $400,000. The work included installation of a new pump system and vault to hold related equipment, minor masonry repairs and cleaning of the fountain and statue.
“Not only is the fountain operational again, but the water flow has been restored to all three sides, rather than just a single side as had been the case for a number of years,” Litterst said.
Even more work is needed, according to Litterst. Additional restoration scheduled for later this spring will include waterproofing the fountain base — and, alas, shutting the fountain off again for about six weeks.
Still, Dupont Circle visitors enjoyed the water while it lasted, perhaps subconsciously drawn by the glistening waterfall spilling from the fountain’s top. Some wore tube tops. Some wore tie-dyes. A shirtless man tanned in one of the Adirondack chairs on the grass.
Bill McLeod, executive director of the Dupont Circle Business Improvement District (BID), said the fountain is “the lifeblood of Dupont Circle.” Even if not everyone notices, a working fountain sends a message that a dry fountain does not.
“It shows that something is being maintained,” he said. “When something being maintained, that says that someone cares. People show up and use it more.”
Unfortunately, D.C. cannot always depend on Dupont Circle’s waters to swish luxuriantly around their marble bowl. Over the years, the fountain’s flow has been threatened or halted by construction, government shutdowns and water pressure problems.
The fountain came to the circle in 1921 only after the DuPont family funded it — replacing a statute of Adm. Samuel Francis Du Pont that the clan disapproved of — and also paid to increase the water pressure.
In the decades that followed, the fountain became the center of one of Northwest Washington’s most beautiful neighborhoods — indeed, an expression of the City Beautiful movement that reinvented American cities. Unfortunately, even when the water was flowing, city officials were too busy keeping people out of the water to enjoy it.
“The American public in hot weather has a passion for getting under any running water within reach,” U.S. Grant III, the director of public buildings and public parks of the national capital tasked with policing the fountain, complained in 1928.
After a disconnection for construction of an underpass in the mid-20th century, the fountain has persisted despite occasional vandalism, tilting that compromised the flow from its three scuppers, and suspected dye bombings that made its water run red.
However, the fountain’s past failures were washed away this week. Once made aware of the fountain, Oginni admitted that it was “tranquil.” She recalled coming to the park with her grandchildren, unsuccessfully trying to keep them out of the water.
The fountain, she said, “makes Dupont Circle, Dupont Circle.”
“It gives it that Paris feel,” she said.
Dupont Circle fountain turned off and drained while conservators remove vandalism. It should be clean and back on by the end of the week. pic.twitter.com/NVyl7zsLZi
— National Mall NPS (@NationalMallNPS) August 14, 2017
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