Living in Dupont Circle, Washington DC

Henry Bacon designed the fountain at the center of Dupont Circle and Daniel Chester French carved its allegorical figures, a 1921 memorial to Rear Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont that replaced an 1884 statue of him. Massachusetts Avenue runs northwest from the circle past Embassy Row, one of the largest concentrations of foreign missions in the country, many housed in mansions built for Gilded Age industrialists before diplomats moved in. The Phillips Collection, a few blocks south on 21st Street, opened that same year as the first museum in the United States devoted to modern art, its intimate galleries still housed inside Duncan Phillips's converted family home. A farmers market fills the circle's plaza every Sunday morning, and the Dupont Circle Metro station's Red Line entrances sit within a block or two of most nearby addresses.

Restaurants and bars along Connecticut Avenue and P Street keep the blocks immediately around the circle loud on weekend nights, and the neighborhood's safety rating sits closer to the middle of the pack than the quieter residential streets just north.

The combination of embassies, a modern-art museum, and rail access in nearly every direction makes Dupont Circle one of the easiest neighborhoods in the city to live in without a car — and one of the pricier ones to do it in.