Following a massive outcry from community members and politicians, the National Park Service has canceled its plans to close down the park at Dupont Circle, long considered the center of Washington, D.C.’s historically LGBTQ neighborhood. 

On Monday, June 2, the National Park Service announced that the park at the center of Dupont Circler would be closed to the public from June 5 to June 9, which coincides with the apex of the WorldPride DC 2025 festivities, a global LGBTQ celebration D.C. is hosting for the first time. 

At the time, Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the National Park Service, said in a statement that the park’s closure was made at the behest of the Metropolitan Police Department to “keep the community and visitors safe and protect one of D.C.’s most treasured public spaces.”

When approached for comment, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office and MPD referred all questions to the National Park Service, as reported by The Washington Post. Pamela Smith, the current MPD chief of police, previously led the U.S. Park Police.

Less than 24 hours after the plans were announced, D.C. Councilmember Zachary Parker (D-Ward 5), the Council’s only openly gay member, announced in a post on X that the decision had been reversed.

“I spoke with Chief Smith this morning and I’m glad to report that the decision to close DuPont Circle Park is being rescinded,” Parker wrote. “The Park is central to the LGBTQ community, and neighbors will be able to enjoy it this year for World Pride.”

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A spokesperson for Parker told Metro Weekly that the councilmember had reached out to Smith to ask what prompted the request.

He was told that Smith made the request to shut down Dupont Circle in order to ensure that MPD officers could be deployed elsewhere during the upcoming WorldPride festivities, including the WorldPride Pride Parade and Street Festival and Concert.

The spokesperson further relayed that Smith reportedly told Parker that she had worried that the number of police needed to patrol or control crowds at the circle would place further strain on already limited police resources, based on “historical experiences with Pride.”

However, after receiving negative feedback from various community partners, Smith told Parker that she was officially rescinding her request to the Park Service.

The “historical experiences” mentioned by Smith appear to refer to vandalism and graffiti on the circle’s central fountain that occurred in June 2023 that “resulted in approximately $175,000 in damage to the historic Dupont Circle fountain.”

The cleanup of the graffiti angered neighborhood residents and Park Service officials alike, as it reportedly delayed the timeline for the restoration of the historic fountain. as the D.C. blog PoPville reported at the time. 

NPS spokesperson Litterst also said the decision to close the circle to potential Pride revelers was in line with President Donald Trump’s executive orders focused on protecting federal monuments and statues.

The initial announcement rankled some community members, who interpreted the closure of the historic park as a symbolic jab at LGBTQ people from the Trump administration.

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Ryan Bos, executive director of Capital Pride Alliance, took umbrage at attempts to link Capital Pride with the vandalism of the Dupont Circle fountain.

“There has been vandalism over the past few years at Dupont Circle, and incorrectly, we have been tied to it,” he told Metro Weekly. “And we have not done any sanctioned Capital Pride events at Dupont Circle for many years. The parade, for the last two years, hasn’t gone around the circle.

“We did know that they wanted to figure out how to protect the fountain,” Bos added. “But we’re gathering more information to better understand the steps they’re putting in place to protect aspects of the park that have been damaged in previous years to unrelated Capital Pride events.”

Jeff Rueckgauer, the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner who represents the district that includes the circle, called it “extremely disappointing and infuriating” for the Park Service to make the closure announcement just days before the bulk of Pride festivities are slated to take place. 

But, like Bos, Rueckgauer says that people have wrongly conflated the vandalism of the fountain with the Pride celebrations.

Rueckgauer notes that it was anti-war protesters, not Pride attendees, who dumped red dye into the fountain, causing damage to the pumps and the lining. 

“I’m not saying that vandalism did not occur, but I have a feeling that they’re conflating something or taking an incident out of context,” he says. “The fact that the Interior Department is sending out PR on it, saying, ‘This is in line with the administration’s edicts about protecting and preserving our monuments,’ that’s just hogwash. I think it’s more that the administration wants to make a point that they don’t like the gay community, and what better way to take away one of our major icons during WorldPride?”

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Although he acknowledged that the center of LGBTQ nightlife and the majority of LGBTQ people in the District no longer live or congregate in Dupont Circle — especially when compared to neighborhoods like Logan Circle, Shaw, or the U Street corridor — Rueckgauer said the closure would have been particularly symbolic.

“Dupont is in the DNA of the Washington gay community,” he said. “This is where we got started. Dupont has been embedded in so many different movements over the years. The anti-war movement was here. We had the Civil Rights Movement protests here. It’s always been a place that’s been the focus of struggles for recognition, for equality for various groups, for peace. So while the gay community does not ‘own’ Dupont Circle, we have a very intimate relationship with it and the neighborhood surrounding it. So closing the circle is pretty much an attack on everyone who’s ever spoken up for decency or progress in Washington.”

Deacon Maccubbin, who launched DC Gay Pride in 1975, placed the blame primarily on the Trump administration. 

“We know that there are good and decent people still in the National Park Service, but that organization is now being controlled by the bully in chief who sought to obliterate our history in the manner of George Orwell’s Big Brother,” Maccubbin said in an email statement to Metro Weekly.

“NPS plotted to fence off Dupont Circle, an area that has been central to our history as a joyful people, in the middle of WorldPride. But, as Mayor Bowser noted last week, D.C. is ‘the gayest city in the country’ and our allies on the DC Council got to work. They raised objections to the proposed plot and were successful at getting NPS to rescind their plan.”

Had the closure gone forward, it would have given D.C., as the host city of WorldPride, another black eye following the cancellation of the WorldPride Opening Concert last Friday and reports that hotel bookings for the upcoming weekend are falling short of expectations.

The latter has been attributed to the reticence of international visitors to travel to the United States due to the Trump administration’s stricter screenings of foreign nationals entering the country and reports of detentions of some people visiting the United States on tourist visas.

That reticence, in turn, has dampened expectations for the financial windfall that the D.C. economy, particularly the service industry, was supposed to reap by hosting WorldPride.