You’ve heard of bargain basement shopping, but Dupont Circle is giving it new meaning.

This Sunday, check out at the from 12 to 5 p.m.

“It’s going to be a funky flea market,” Producer David Ross told ĂÛÌÒÊÓÆ”app. “I did a market there in January of 2020 called ‘Below Zero.’ It was the first market really done there. About 5,000 people came out and it went really well, so I wanted to come back to Dupont.”

Entry is at the intersection of .

“It’s right next to the Starbucks over on 19th Street,” Producer David Ross told ĂÛÌÒÊÓÆ”app. “It will be on the platform level, which is about 15,000 square feet. That’s where we’re going to have vendors selling all kinds of items from vintage clothing, collectibles, arts, sweets.”

A total of 18 vendors will set up shop to sell handmade arts, crafts and goods.

“ does an amazing banana pudding,” Ross said. “A great painter Eduardo comes with 40 pieces that are very eclectic. … The Future of What sells vintage items by Kelly Queener from Richmond. … Ìę, an independent bookstore [targeting] people of color. … Made it for You is a guy who makes bikes. Capital Vintage [sells] vintage clothes.”

Ross also runs a similar market across the river in Arlington, Virginia.

“I do a weekly market in Arlington called ,” Ross said. “First, we were on the plaza level at 220 South 20th Street, but we moved to 2121 Crystal Drive. … We were there every Saturday selling … leather goods, purses, handbags, accessories.”

He insists it’s more expansive than a typical flea market or crafts show.

“This encompasses everything,” Ross said. “The more appropriate term would be almost like a bazaar, an international market. If you’ve ever been to a market overseas, you see anything and everything being sold and people negotiating on anything and everything.”

Regardless of location, he is amazed at the products that folks come up with.

“I’m continually impressed by how creative people are in the region,” Ross said. “You never know who is in your backyard until you start doing these things. Old, young, all backgrounds are really doing some creative stuff, so I definitely want to show it more.”

Listen to our full conversation here.

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WASHINGTON — Twenty feet below the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Dupont Circle, David Ross and Kristopher Johnson-Hoyle are running through logistics for Saturday night’s fashion show in D.C.’s Dupont Underground.

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“The models will emerge from here,” said Ross, pulling open a set of double doors in the dimly lit tunnel. “The runway will follow the tracks.”

For the last three years, Ross and his colleagues at have been transforming the 75,000-square-foot subterranean space, once home to D.C.’s streetcar system, into a cultural hub.

The 501(c)(3) organizes concerts, art installations, tours and pop-up retail — and on Saturday, April 15, it’s hosting an underground fashion show.

“The physical space itself, I think, is so conducive to a high-fashion runway show. There’s a little bit of yin and yang here,” said Kristopher Johnson-Hoyle, marketing chairman for D.C.’s (CFAE).

In the empty tunnels that echo, dust and dirt cover the concrete ground, and graffiti decorates the walls.

“And we’re going to fill it with beautiful clothes,” Johnson-Hoyle added.

The goal behind Saturday’s event — a partnership between Dupont Underground, CFAE and National Cherry Blossom Festival — is to highlight D.C.’s present and growing fashion industry.

“We are an emerging market for fashion. Between 2012 and 2015, the fashion industry, as a whole, has created 2,400 jobs here in Washington, D.C.,” Johnson-Hoyle said.

And he only expects that number to increase as D.C.’s creative entrepreneurial community continues to grow.

The underground program, appropriately titled “Underneath It All: An Underground Fashion Showcase,” will feature five rising D.C. designers, each of whom will debut 10 looks. However, Ross and Johnson-Hoyle say audience members can expect more than just clothes. With music and the dramatic setting, they promise it will be “a night of entertainment.”

“We’re going to really start changing the way in which people see fashion here in the city,” Johnson-Hoyle said.

The “Underneath It All” fashion show is open to the public. Admission is $40 for general seating and $100 for front row. Tickets can be purchased .

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But the tunnels, under Dupont Circle, are reopening Saturday as an interactive art space.

It’s called Dupont Underground; to get in, visitors walk down stairs that streetcar riders used until the station closed in 1962.

Board member Lauren Victor said they’ve made no changes to the original structure, other than to wash the walls and floors.

“So it’s looking cleaner. Otherwise, it [has] original tiles and original tracks still in place,” Victor said while giving ĂÛÌÒÊÓÆ”app a sneak preview.

The last time the tunnels were used was for a food court in the 1990s.

Now, the space is filled with an installation called “Raise/Raze” that uses donated plastic balls from last summer’s popular “Beach” exhibit at the National Building Museum.

“The balls were made into cubes [and] cubes are held together by Velcro, and anything that’s not higher than your head, you’re going to be allowed to take apart and put together as you wish,” Victor said.

There is one exception: benches made from the ball-blocks for visitors to sit on, have been glued together and can’t be disassembled.

One part of the installation looks like a downsized version of the Colosseum.

Another is called “The Forest.”

“This is the one end where the ball structure actually goes floor to ceiling,” she said.

Although the installation will be open weekends and many weeknights from April 30 through June 1, timed tickets are completely sold out.

That could change since there’s so much demand.

“We are really trying to figure out ways that we can open up new time slots,” Victor said.

Dupont Underground has a five-year lease on the space, so more events will be planned.

So far, the project has been funded largely through donations, and Victor and other members of the board are donating their time.

If you’d like to donate, you can do so .

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Other than a short stint as a fallout shelter in the 1960s and a food court in the 1990s, the station remained largely unused for more than 50 years.

For months now, the Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground has been in the forgotten tunnels with tracks, with theÌęgoal of adding art and welcoming the public inÌęthis year.

“It’s a way to show the world that this is a top-tier art city,” says Philippa Hughes, with the Arts Coalition for Dupont Underground.

The group is leasing the station from the city and plans to open its doors on April 30. The first exhibition is called “Raise/Raze,” which will consist of 650,000 plastic balls used during the Beach Exhibit last summer at the National Building Museum.

“People will be able to come down and see cubes everywhere and they can build them into different structures,” Hughes says.

Hou de Sousa, a firm from New York, won a design competitionÌęforÌęthe exhibit, and they will begin putting it together this weekend.

Hughes said making the cubes which will be used to assemble the exhibit.

Getting the tunnel to this point has involved countless volunteer hours and has uncovered some interesting items, including tin cans with crackers from its time as a fallout shelter.

“There was a dentist chair … who knows why that was here,” Hughes says.

mostly through crowd funding and is part of a five-year lease from the city to Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground.

Tickets forÌęthe first event, which runsÌęfrom April 30 through June 1, are $15 andÌę.

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The BEACH, a large-scale art installation at the National Building Museum, will be repurposed by for a second installation and a design contest. But before that can happen, the 10,000 square-foot installation, filled with more thanÌę650,000 plastic balls, has to be moved.

Would you like to help?

Dupont Underground is looking for volunteers to help pack up the balls, load them onto trucks, and unload them into the underground art space.

The collective has set up an where volunteers can reserve tickets (they’re free) as a way of signing up for shifts.

If ticket “sales” are anything to go by, this daunting task is pretty popular: The final task — pouring the balls into the space — has already “sold” out. A few other shifts have as well, so if you’re interested in volunteering, sign up now.

Those looking to volunteer should read event descriptions carefully before signing up. The boxes of balls will be moved “conveyor belt-style” into the underground space, according to the event page. There’s no conveyor belt down there, but the sheer strength of 25 volunteers passing boxes hand-to-hand should do the trick.

If you’ve never heard of Dupont Underground, it may be because the arts collective is actually underground. Dupont Underground is turning the abandoned trolley station under Dupont Circle into a space for art, design, performances and pop-up shops fromÌęcreative types in the area.

To recycle the BEACH balls, Dupont Underground is organizing a design competition to accompany an installation at the art space.

Representatives from the National Building Museum, Dupont Underground and the D.C. art scene will serve as judges for the contest.

Chase Rynd, president and executive director of the National Building Museum, said in a about the partnership that the BEACH balls will not go to waste.

“From the beginning of this unique installation, we looked for ways to ensure that the building materials would be either reused for educational and creative purposes, or recycled.”

Created by the architecture collective , The BEACH’s “ocean” has attracted more thanÌę120,000 visitors since it opened on July 4.

The BEACH will close on Monday, Sept. 7, and volunteers will begin packing balls that afternoon. Unfortunately, tickets to the installation are no longer available, but those who missed the original installation should stay tuned for Dupont Underground’s reincarnation.

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WASHINGTON — Towering orange and yellow construction cranes have become a regular sight in D.C.’s skyline as the city continues adding apartments, retail and restaurants. But one of the most exciting developments in the District is happening underground.

About 20 feet below Connecticut Avenue in Dupont Circle, members of the nonprofit are gearing up for a project they’ve been working on for more than a decade: transformingÌę75,000 square feet of abandoned space into a usable public destination.

The current Dupont Underground has servedÌęa number of purposes in its 65 years. It was originally home to D.C.’s trolley trains in the late 1940s. When the trolley and streetcar system was suspended in 1962, the underground space was used as a fallout shelter; then, in the ‘90s, it was converted into an underground food court.

“That was a bad idea; it was badly implemented and it failed within less than a year,” says Braulio Agnese, who serves on the ACDU board of directors and is the organization’s communication consultant.

After the food court shut down, the entrances to the underground were left open for some time. But the city eventually boarded and locked the stairways after realizing the entrances were collecting trash and attracting squatters.

If you’ve walked around Dupont Circle, chances are you’ve seen at least one of the nine entrances to the underground (there’s one next to the Starbucks and one near the Books-A-Million) and didn’t give the rectangular concrete blocks a second thought.

“For the last 10 years, people have just had no idea what those things are. They think it might be Metro infrastructure 
 There are lots of urban rumors about what they are,” says Agnese, who hopes residents soon associate those mysterious blocks with one of the city’s most dynamic and creative spaces.

Making Progress on the Platforms

In 2010, the city issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for the use of the underground. After being chosen, ACDU was granted a five-and-a-half-year lease this past December for the space. Now, it’s time to get to work.

“I have the key in my pocket at all times,” Agnese says.Ìę

Even though the lease for the Dupont Underground is for the full 75,000 square feet, Agnese says the initial plan is to focus only on one third of the space — the 23,000 square feet that occupies the east platform as well as some tunnel space. And while Agnese is eager to open the underground, he says ACDU is not rushing its plans.

“The space is unusual — has a lot of potential, but it’s difficult. And so we’re being very deliberate in our approach to understanding the space and its potential,” he says.

“Unusual” is the correct adjective to describeÌęthe space. It’s incredibly linear — just 30 feet at the widest point, where the trolley platforms once stood. While it may be difficult to envisionÌęthe underground space being used for anything other than transit purposes, ACDU is looking past the limitations of the layout. It plans to use the underground’s uniqueness to its advantage; it plans on getting creative.

Agnese says little will be done to enhance the design of the former transit space. “It wasn’t created to be aesthetically pleasing; it was purely utilitarian, but you get this kind of vaulted, scalloped space,” he says.

“We could easily do dropped ceilings and dry wall on the walls to condition the space and bring the power and the plumbing and stuff like that, but then you lose the character of the space, and part of the reason we love this space is not just for its location beneath Dupont Circle, but the nature of the space, itself. It’s got this great industrial aspect that’s really kind of rare in the city. We want to be able to celebrate that as much as possible, going forward 
 so all of the design solutions will have to be as elegant and as minimal as possible.”

In addition to power and plumbing, the coalition needs to upgrade the underground to include fire escapes and address other safety concerns. Figuring out the layout of the underground wasn’t an easy task for ACDU. Because the space was once used as a fallout shelter, as-built drawings and blueprints “are locked in Homeland Security files somewhere,” Agnese says.

Therefore,Ìęit’s up to ACDU to document the platforms and tunnelsÌęand understand what’s needed for short-term upgrades, as well as what a future build out of the space might require.

“There are a few unknowns, but no concerns in terms of structural integrity; there’s no asbestos down there or anything like that — it’s a concrete box,” Agnese says.

Construction costs are not coming from public funds, so ACDU is . Agnese says the improvements most likely won’t happen for three to six months, and in the meantime, the space may be used for one-off events.

Creating a Creative Space

After the initial construction, Agnese says ACDU wants to take its time before doing anything permanent in the underground. It wants to see how crowds work in the space, it wants to test the types of events that work well underground, and ACDU wants to potentially take advantage of the tunnel’s acoustics and conduct sound projects in the underground. Really, anything could happen.

The point of studying the space, Agnese says, is so that after the initial lease, ACDU will have a model on which to pursue a long-term lease with the city.

“The space will pretty much be a black spot, blank slate, open as it is to try different things. We expect to do temporary structures, different kinds of partitions 
 but any kind of permanent build-out would not happen until later, when we hope to tackle the whole site or as much of it as possible.”

And while ACDU has not decided what to permanently do with the space, it’s clear Agnese has his eye on the arts.

“There’s a good arts scene in D.C., but it’s a little fractured. We’d like to become a hub for that kind of thing,” he says.

“It’s a space that offers potential. There are a lot of good galleries, but they have small footprints, and this offers a chance for them to explore maybe other opportunities and different kinds of installations and events and what not.”

He also thinks the underground could attract exhibitions that currently bypass the city.

“We want to be nimble and provocative and foster forward-thinking kinds of discussion, both with art and design.”

Adding permanent and/or commercial tenants to the underground is another possibility, but Agnese says that likely won’t happen for a while.

“In addition to what we want to do on the cultural side, there are other things going on so that people are always coming to Dupont Circle and to the underground, for one reason or another.”

Regardless of its final purpose, Agnese says ACDU hopes the underground not only serves as a new and exciting space for tourists; he hopes it unites the city and the neighborhood, as well.

“We want somebody halfway around the world to learn about it and say, ‘Hey, I want to visit that.’ But we also want people in the city to be coming for various things — whether it’s an exhibit or a gallery talk or a theater performance or something.”

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Patrick Pendleton Smith, a Cleveland Park resident and real estate consultant, recently pitched the Arts Coalition for the Dupont Underground on the 41-room micro hotel concept as part of a larger plan he calls Dupont Circle Artwerks. The $26 million mixed-use project would include the hotel, with rooms as small as 180 square feet, a fine arts storage facility, cafes, a restaurant, art gallery, blackbox theater and artist studios.

His proposal could give ACDU the economic viability it needs to finally make a go of the vacant former trolley station space’s transformation . Smith said revenue generated from the hotel and other commercial uses could bring in enough income to justify setting aside space for artist studios and galleries.

Smith isn’t proposing developing the hotel concept on his own but would like to be part of a larger development team.

“You’ve got Dupont Circle, Metro lines, access to the arts — it’s all there,” Smith said. “When I put all that together, I said, ‘You could really do this.'”

If you’ve read this far and lived in Washington for any length of time, you’re probably rolling your eyes and thinking, “Oh, here they go again with Dupont Underground.” The ACDU unveiled plans to convert the long-abandoned underground trolley station into an arts center in 2008 and two years later won the rights to develop the space as part of a request for proposals issued by the city. Since then, that would be both economically viable and contribute to D.C.’s arts-and-culture scene.

How’s this any different? The current model appears to include enough economic return for the city to help subsidize the planned cultural space. ACDU spokesman Braulio Agnese stressed that the hotel concept was both unsolicited and very early in its vetting process. But he said Smith’s pitch, including financial modeling, is strong enough to run past city officials and other groups. ACDU plans to meet with District economic development officials next week to talk about potential next steps.

“It’s a starting point at the most and nothing more, but it also offers us something to show to potential partners,” Agnese told me. “We have to give them the dollars and cents to have them understand the notion of the project.”

Smith said he hopes to appeal to so-called cultural tourists who want to stay in a place like Dupont Circle with its own distinctive flair without paying an arm and a leg. And while sleeping in a room with no windows might not seem appealing, Smith said high-definition technology could be used to create virtual skylights and windows to make the rooms feel more airy.

Agnese said an important part of the concept is to introduce a street-level entrance. The ACDU has pitched that idea to the nearby Dupont Hotel, 1500 New Hampshire Ave. NW, and SB-Urban, a developer with proposing to convert the . He said the Dupont Hotel could potentially be brought in to operate a bar and spa in part of the Dupont Underground space, he said.

“To make a subterranean space work, you need to have an above-ground presence,” he said.

Agnese said other groups could be brought in to display their collections in the proposed art gallery spaces, including foreign embassies and the Phillips Collection locally.

The idea of making use of the vacant tunnel space isn’t new. Since the last of D.C.’s streetcars were shut down in 1962, the space was designated as a fallout shelter until 1975 and then sat completely abandoned until 1995. It was then refurbished as Dupont Down Under, a failed food court concept with vendors including shopping mall mainstay Sbarro Pizza. But that concept failed to catch on and the space was shuttered after six months and has been vacant since then.

Not for a lack of other ideas, of course. Several ideas were floated before ACDU stepped in calling for the space to be used as a bicycle commuter lot, a home for adult clubs and gay bars, a gym, mausoleum and even for rental storage.

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