In 2011, we designed a “Cap Park” over the old underpass
In 2011, as part of the Dupont Underground master plan, Hunt Laudi Studio proposed capping the Connecticut Avenue underpass to create a public plaza that would host the Dupont Circle Farmers Market. Our rendering became part of an article in the Washington Post in 2014 that stimulated public support to fund the initial feasibility study. Today, DDOT's $37.8M Connecticut Avenue Streetscape and Deckover, under construction since 2025, is expected to open sometime in 2027, programmed to include a farmers market. Same firm, same block, below and above grade: Dupont Underground (built) and the Dupont “Deckover” (under construction).
The proposal
The Connecticut Avenue underpass has divided Dupont Circle since the 1940s, a trench of moving traffic cutting the neighborhood's main street in two, with the sidewalks on either side left to face each other across a gap.
In 2011, as part of our work on the Dupont Underground, we proposed covering it to repair an old mistake.
The drawing above shows what we published: a public space sheltered by an undulating green roof between the Circle and Q Street, with a public market beneath and stitching the two sides of Connecticut Avenue back together. The traffic keeps running underneath. The neighborhood gets its street back.
We called it a “Cap Park”.
The project today
The District is now building a plaza on that site.
DDOT's Connecticut Avenue Streetscape and Deckover project, decks over the underpass between Dupont Circle and Q Street NW to create a new public plaza, alongside rebuilt sidewalks, lighting, and protected bike lanes. Construction began in summer 2025 and is expected to open in spring 2027. The programming DDOT and the Dupont Circle BID describe for the finished plaza includes outdoor dining, film screenings, and a farmers market, exactly the use our 2011 drawing put beneath the canopy.
We were not the design architects of the project under construction. We were, in 2011, among those who put the idea on paper and in front of the public.
Below and above
There is a symmetry to this block that we did not plan and have come to appreciate.
Beneath Connecticut Avenue sits the Dupont Underground, an abandoned streetcar station we spent years arguing was worth saving, and which now draws roughly 25,000 visitors a year. Above it, the plaza we drew in 2011 is being poured.
Same firm, same block, below grade and above. Both began the same way: with the conviction that the leftover infrastructure of a city is not waste but opportunity, and that someone has to make the drawing before anyone can see it.
That is the argument we have been making in Washington for twenty years.