Photo: Jared Soares for the New York Times
Dupont Underground, a converted trolley station, functions as an experimental art and cultural space in Washington’s Dupont Circle neighborhood.
Kids are pretty literal about things they hear adults say. I knew a girl, a granddaughter of John D. Rockefeller, who when very young was supposed to recite Bible verses with all the students in her school. In her mind, the words “Praise and magnify Him forever” were “Praise the grandfather with a feather.” Someone corrected her.
If I were to tell one of my young granddaughters about underground art, I suspect she’d picture art that was literally under the ground, maybe for the ants that “go marching one by one, down to the ground, to get out of the rain.”
In Washington, DC, she’d be close to the mark. As Avantika Chilkoti wrote recently for the New York Times, an experimental-art space is located under Dupont Circle.
“Roaming the streets of the Dupont Circle neighborhood about 20 years ago, Julian Hunt spotted a grimy staircase leading down from the pavement to a boarded-up door.
“He spent many hours on the phone and in the city’s archives, which led Mr. Hunt to crawl through filthy tunnels with a flashlight to discover an old trolley tunnel inhabited by a small group of homeless people.
“Since the city’s trolley service shut down in 1962, the 75,000-square-foot labyrinth had been the site of a subterranean murder, rumored ’80s rave parties and a Cold War-era bomb shelter. Now, Mr. Hunt, an architect who was a founder of the Hunt Laudi Studio, has turned the tunnels into the Dupont Underground art space, which draws 3,000 visitors every month. …
“The tunnels are now part of a wave of spaces — from small galleries that host artists to sitting rooms that accommodate musicians — where local talent can showcase work in the capital rather than fleeing to New York. …
“ ‘We’re this intermediate opportunity,’ said Noel Kassewitz, director for arts programming at Dupont Underground. ‘We’re a young nonprofit so we have the flexibility to host more experimental works here while at the same time having the space.” …
“The tunnels belong to the District of Columbia government. But after much haggling with the authorities, delayed further by the turmoil of the global financial crisis, Mr. Hunt won a five-year lease in 2014.
“His nonprofit has since spent about $300,000 — raised through crowdfunding and private donations as well as ticket sales — to clean the space and install basic lights and ventilation. Local officials are watching its success closely after an attempt to draw people to the tunnels with a food court on another platform failed in the 1990s.
“For Mr. Hunt, the project is a form of activism in a city where, when people think of beautiful architecture, they think mostly of the preservation of historic buildings.
“ ‘It’s not the kind of activism where you actually do things, new things and where you experiment,’ Mr. Hunt said. ‘That’s not here. This is not an entrepreneurial city.’ ” More here. Check out the pictures.
I do like the concept, but I wish the reporter had told me what happened to the homeless people that Hunt found there 20 years ago.
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