Today, the Strivers' Section is still largely occupied by the Edwardian residences that have populated the area since its historical roots, along with a number of apartment and condominium buildings and a few small businesses.Ĭonstruction of the traffic circle, originally called Pacific Circle, began in 1871. It takes its name from a turn-of-the-century writer who described the district as "the Striver's section, a community of Negro aristocracy." Strivers' Section was historically an enclave of upper-middle-class African Americans - often community leaders - in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including a row of houses on 17th Street that were owned by Frederick Douglass and occupied by his son. This section, west of 16th Street roughly between Swann Street and Florida Avenue, is today a historic district called the Strivers' Section. The current boundaries of Dupont Circle include a small residential section that was once an overlap between Dupont and the Shaw neighborhood.
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Roosevelt from 15 Dupont Circle, continuing throughout World War II to push her policies, which were echoed in the New York Daily News, run by her brother Joseph Medill Patterson, and the Chicago Tribune, run by their first cousin, Colonel Robert R. Cissy Patterson later acquired the Washington Times-Herald (sold to The Washington Post in 1954) and declared journalistic warfare on Franklin D. Lindbergh made several public appearances at the house, waving to roaring crowds from the second-story balcony, and befriended the Patterson Family, with whom he increasingly came to share isolationist and pro- German views. The Coolidges welcomed Charles Lindbergh as a houseguest after his historic transatlantic flight. Calvin Coolidge in 1927 while the White House underwent renovation. The house served as temporary quarters for President and Mrs. Patterson's incapacitation in the early 1920s, the house passed into the hands of her daughter, Cissy Patterson, who made it a hub of Washington social life. This Italianate mansion, the only survivor of the many mansions that once ringed the circle, was built in 1901 by New York architect Stanford White for Robert Patterson, editor of the Chicago Tribune, and his wife Nellie, heiress to the Chicago Tribune fortune. One such grand residence is the marble and terra cotta Patterson house at 15 Dupont Circle (currently the Washington Club). Many of these larger dwellings were built in the styles popular between 18. Rarer are the palatial mansions and large freestanding houses that line the broad, tree-lined diagonal avenues that intersect the circle. Many of the grid streets are lined with three- and four-story rowhouses built primarily before the end of the 19th century, often variations on the Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque revival styles.
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Some of Washington's wealthiest residents constructed houses here in the late 19th century and early 20th century, leaving a legacy of two types of housing in the historic district. The area was a rural backwater until after the Civil War, when it first became a fashionable residential neighborhood. Map of Washington, D.C., with Dupont Circle neighborhood highlighted in red