Dozens of feet below Dupont Circle, the only human touch now on a long-shuttered 1940s-era trolley station is the occasional beer can and faded graffiti on the white tiled walls.
But a local nonprofit sees a restaurant, wine tasting room, movie theater, bookstore — or some combination of the four — in conjunction with an art gallery occupying the station and vacuous tunnels feeding into it.
“This has been abandoned for 50 years because no developer paid attention to it and the city didn’t know what to do with it,” said Julian Hunt, founder of the Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground, which is raising money to lease the space from the District. “[We see] something that can be a permanent institution to help us fund an arts component.”
During a tour hosted by the coalition on Wednesday, a hodgepodge group of residents, artists and those in the real estate industry walked the 75,000-square-foot space of underground tracks that parallel Connecticut Avenue’s local lanes around and out of the circle in Northwest. Hunt said he has been approached by three wineries, several restaurants and one major movie theater chain about retail space in the underground. He declined to name specific retailers.
Attempts over the years to reopen the space have been short-lived. In 1995, a proposal to turn the station into a food court quickly failed.
The coalition, formed more than three years ago, hopes to reach a long-term lease agreement with the city potentially by the end of the year. But the hard part is finding a developer to take on the hairy project.
“It’s not a big project, but it’s complex.” Hunt said. “And the problem is making it financially viable.”
A movie house, for example, would likely have to excavate to widen the tunnel and create sufficient space for a boutique theater. That can be expensive and potentially create a land rights issue if the digging extended into the ground underneath the federally owned park at Dupont.
But once they reach an agreement with a developer, Hunt said the first retail space could be ready to go as soon as a year later.
