Dupont Circle

This guide to Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. opens at the marble fountain's carved figure of Stars, bowed over a globe, and works back to what she replaced: a bronze statue of Admiral Samuel Francis Du Pont, erected in 1884 and mocked by Washingtonians almost from the start. Nineteenth-century sailors like Du Pont navigated by wind, sea and stars rather than instruments, trusting each one to be right. His own family was mortified by the statue's tilting base and the jokes it drew.