"My revenue is down 42% since the start of construction; my guest count is down 61.6%." That is what Golden Age bar owner Jeff Coles told the DC Council this spring, describing what months of jackhammers and jersey barriers have done to a business that used to fill up on a Friday night. He was one of several Dupont Circle owners who spent an afternoon at a budget hearing explaining, in numbers, what anyone walking Connecticut Avenue already knew from the foot traffic: the corridor is having a hard year.
Except the corridor is also having one of its better years for new restaurant openings. Uchi's sushi bar filled a 185-seat room near the circle in May. The Riggsby, one of DC's more missed supper clubs, came back in June inside the Royal Sonesta on P Street. Kayu, a modern Filipino kitchen that had closed its H Street location, resurfaced with a Dupont dining room within two months of shutting down. None of that happened once the construction cleared out. It happened while the construction was still tearing up the block those restaurants sit on.
That is the actual story in Dupont Circle right now. Two things that sound like they should contradict each other are both true on the same four blocks.
The Avenue Is Coming Apart by Design
The mess on Connecticut Avenue has a name, the Connecticut Avenue Streetscape and Deckover project, and a price tag of $37.8 million, roughly a quarter of it covered by the Federal Highway Trust Fund. Streetscape work began in the median in June 2025. Detours for the deckover portion, the part that will actually cap the underpass between Q Street and the circle, went in that September.
Almost a year later, the picture has changed. Ward 2 Councilmember Brooke Pinto reported this summer that all 49 support girders for the deck are now in place, ahead of schedule, and that the plaza on top could be finished as soon as this coming January, with the full streetscape wrapping by summer 2027. That is a faster timeline than residents have grown used to hearing. It also caps off a request that predates most of the businesses currently suffering through it: neighbors have been petitioning to cover that stretch of underpass since the 1960s, when it was, by most accounts, just an open pit in the middle of the street.
Once finished, the deck becomes a plaza built for dining, walking, and the kind of programming DDOT has floated publicly: outdoor movies, live music, a farmers market on top of what used to be traffic lanes. For now it is beams, barriers, and a single open lane in each direction.
The Toll Sheet and the Reservation Book
The hardship testimony from this spring was specific. Coles described a jersey barrier more than 100 meters long that blocked rideshare access to his door and was scheduled to stay in place through July. Down the block, FH Amsterdam convenience store owner Hamdu Abduselam told a local TV crew that customers can no longer park near his shop, some assume it is closed, and he has gone months without paying rent. The Dupont Circle Business Improvement District asked the DC Council for $2 million in emergency relief this year, double what it requested the year before. The city has not approved that full amount. The Department of Small and Local Business Development did award $10,000 grants to individual businesses along the 1500, 1600, and 1700 blocks, a smaller and more targeted response than the BID had asked for. Taim, a longtime Dupont eatery, closed its doors this year, and some in the neighborhood have pointed to the construction as a likely factor, though no single cause has been confirmed.
That is the toll sheet. Here is the reservation book, opened during the same stretch of construction:
- Uchi opened near Dupont on May 12, a 185-seat outpost of the Austin-born sushi concept, brought in by Hai Hospitality with a full omakase menu and a heavy happy hour.
- The Riggsby reopened June 3 inside the Royal Sonesta on P Street, restaurateur Michael Schlow's second attempt at a concept he had been trying to relocate since the original closed in 2019.
- Kayu resurfaced in Dupont with chef Paolo Dungca's Filipino menu after shuttering its H Street location, moving into a new dining room less than two months later.
None of these are small, cash-light pop-ups testing whether people will still show up. They are established operators and known chefs committing real capital to the same stretch that is currently posting the kind of sales declines Coles described to the Council. Bill McLeod, the BID's executive director, has made the long game explicit in public comments about the project: narrower roadbeds and slower car traffic, in his framing, are ultimately good for restaurants and retail, even if the two years of construction required to get there are rough on the businesses living through them.
That is the friction a lot of coverage misses. The restaurants opening now are not betting on the neighborhood as it looks in August 2026, with cones and a fenced-off median. They are betting on the neighborhood as it will look once the deck is finished, sometime between January and next summer. The businesses that are struggling are the ones that have to survive the gap between those two dates.
What Hasn't Moved
For everyone who already lives here, the more useful question is what the construction has not touched, because most of the neighborhood's actual weekly rhythm is still running on schedule.
The Sunday FRESHFARM market on 20th Street between Massachusetts Avenue and Hillyer Place is still open year round, still drawing more than 50 farmers and producers during peak season, and still one of the markets national outlets have singled out as among the country's best. It has not moved, and it has not shrunk, construction or no construction.
First Friday Dupont, recently rebranded by the BID as ArtWalk Dupont, continues on a monthly basis, with galleries, embassies, and cultural spaces around the neighborhood staying open late for a self-guided walk. And the BID's Fall Festival and Bluegrass Jamboree returns to Dupont Circle Park in late October, the same live-bluegrass, pumpkin-decorating, costume-contest afternoon it has run for several years now, featuring Shannon Leigh and the Good Bygones, whose debut record won a 2024 Wammie for best folk and bluegrass album.
None of that required the deck to be finished. It just requires the park itself, which construction has left largely alone.
Reading the Cones
The easy read on a neighborhood mid-construction is decline. Torn-up sidewalks, testimony about lost rent, a beloved restaurant closing its doors. All of that is real and none of it should be waved away. But the harder, more useful read is that a construction zone this large, with this much institutional money already committed and this much dining investment arriving in the middle of it, is usually a sign of confidence rather than retreat. Nobody opens a 185-seat sushi room or brings back a shuttered supper club because they think the block is dying. They do it because they can see past the barriers to the plaza on the other side of them.
If you live in Dupont Circle right now, that means holding two facts at once for the next several months. The corridor is genuinely harder to run a business on than it was before the construction crews arrived. It is also, by the calendar DDOT and the Council have laid out, closer to the other side of that than it has been at any point since the beams went up. The market still runs on Sundays. The gallery walk still runs monthly. The Fall Festival is still coming in October. And somewhere between this January and next summer, the hole in the middle of Connecticut Avenue becomes the plaza people have been asking for since before most current residents were born.
If you are thinking about what comes next for a home in Dupont Circle, whether that means staying put through the construction or figuring out what it means for a property you already own here, Floyd Gómez-Starnes has spent years watching how neighborhoods like this one change shape. Let's connect.
