The Target Of Their AmbivalenceSuburban-Retail Icon Seduces Hipsters Of Columbia Heights
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Washington Post Staff Writer
By Monica Hesse
For the hipsters, post-hipsters or quasi-hipsters who moved into Columbia Heights several years ago for the grit and the cheap rent and the proximity to the Wonderland Ballroom (the hipster, post-hipster or quasi-hipster bar that sponsors local music and nights like "Sundress Fest"), life can be divided into two discrete phases: Before Target. After Target.
"Is four times a week bad?" asks Liz Bartolomeo, 26, who works for an arts nonprofit group in Washington and lives at 14th and Irving streets NW. Because she's hitting Target up to four times a week. "It's 'Oh, I need to get cat food.' Then, 'Oh, maybe I'll see what they have for dinner.' 'Oh, I need cotton balls.' 'Oh, I'll see what's on sale.' Before you know it I have a T-shirt, shorts, maybe a new dress." Most of what Bartolomeo buys could have been bought in the CVS just across the street, which has been in the neighborhood for several years. "But I don't want to go to CVS anymore," she says. "The deodorant is locked up in the CVS."
In the Target, the deodorant is in a blindingly white, neatly stocked aisle. It comes in scents like "Lotus Glow" and "Valencia Mist" that you never see at CVS. In the Target complex, which opened a little more than a year ago on 14th Street, you can also visit Bed Bath & Beyond, Marshalls and Best Buy, whence Bartolomeo's roommate once placed an excited call, saying, "Hi, I'm in Best Buy and I'm buying a flat screen," Bartolomeo remembers.
This complex has become a destination, like a movie theater, but with rows of humidifiers and pleather sofas as the entertainment.
But this complex is not why the quasi-hipsters of Columbia Heights had moved to the neighborhood. They were seeking bragging rights, and bodegas spilling over from Mount Pleasant. They were seeking urban.
Columbia Heights is still edgy. A few blocks from the Target, semi-permanent police cars monitor the muggings and shootings that still happen, in broad daylight, even -- as happened a few weeks ago -- at the Metro. This is an area being either positively revitalized or negatively gentrified, depending on how you view the development. It was a thriving, predominantly black neighborhood before it was ravaged by the 1968 riots, and now everyone is trying to either restore it to its former glory (save the Tivoli!) or make it into something new.
No one knows exactly what that something new will ultimately be, but it's starting to look like . . .
The sordid secret is that everyone, even hipsters, has always shopped at Target. Here is how it used to happen: Once every four months, you rented a Zipcar with some trunk space, and then you zipped out of D.C. and down to Jefferson Davis Highway, land of the big-box stores. Along the way, you talked about how glad you were that you didn't live down there, and how ironic it was for you to be going there at all, as you normally just bartered on Freecycle, and how your dad still tried to be cool by pronouncing it in French, Tar-zhay. You got to the Target, and you bought a microsuede storage bench, a duvet and a doormat, and on the way home you stopped at Outback Steakhouse (which was totally hilarious), and in polite company you never spoke of these suburban adventures again.
Target was amusing, when it was located in the suburbs. NIMBY, Target.
Not anymore.
You know the experiment: You put a frog in boiling water, it will try to jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly turn up the heat it will just sit there and die. Residents of Columbia Heights: They are the frogs. Columbia Heights is Jefferson Davis Highway. Columbia Heights is Tenleytown. Target has made us into suburbanites, right in the middle of the Green Line.
So awful. So convenient.
On a recent, muggy evening, Jamie Richardson and Nicole Foley emerge from the Target complex with a shopping cart full of stuff. Richardson wears a graphic tee and a shaggy black haircut, and the slim physique (city-soft) preferred by quasi-hipsters everywhere. Foley is in a vintage-y dress. At the top of their shopping cart is a big box. The box contains a jungle gym for cats. It reads, "Build Your Own Kitty City."
"If I had not been able to walk to the store," Richardson, 26, says, "I would not have bought this."
Purchases like Kitty Cities happen when you live near a Target. Before Target, your cat played in cardboard boxes. Before Target, your dinner plates were cracked group-house hand-me-downs. It never occurred to you that this was a problem.
Sometimes Foley, 21, will find herself wandering to Target just because she's bored, passing time in the housewares aisles.
"Sometimes," she confesses, "I have little urges to have the bathroom all match."
The towels, the bathmat, the embroidered guest towels you always told your mom were dumb.
Which came first, the Target or the adultification?
Allow for a sociological comparison: Columbia Heights is coming into its own at the same time that its younger, transplanted residents are coming of age. They've begun, perhaps, to move out of group houses and into their own places. Perhaps wanting a coordinating bathmat/shower-curtain combo is a fact of life, particularly if you're female. Perhaps it would happen wherever these people lived, even on U Street NW, even on H Street NE.
"I'm 30," says Ana Marin, a bartender with a nose piercing and cool square glasses. On a Thursday evening, she shops at Target. "I [freaking] want matching sheets. The fact that Target came at the same time that I stopped wanting to use a T-shirt as a pillowcase . . ." Well, she's not sure if one affected the other.
"The proximity definitely accelerates" my behavior, sighs Lauren Cameron, 26, who is drifting around Target on a recent evening, carrying a twiggy wreath covered in yellow flowers. She plans to put the wreath on her door. She did not used to be the type of person who would think about buying seasonal wreaths, not Before Target. After Target, things have changed.
This is all fine and good, but the problem with a Target is that it can lead to other nefarious pursuits. It's a gateway drug to other suburban activities.
A tattled confession: "The other day Bob went to Ruby Tuesday's." Bob Arkedis's friends, clustered around an outdoor table at the Wonderland for a recent happy hour, take great delight in ratting him out.
"It was kind of a joke," Arkedis explains to the group. This one time just happened because there was a group of people, and they were all hungry, and they wanted something fast, and they'd just finished doing some activity, so everyone was hungry, so . . . "It's actually not that bad," Arkedis tells his friends defensively. But as a one-time deal. "I won't go back again."
So he says now.
Claibourne Reppert, a tattooed hairstylist who lives on Euclid, has recently begun spending her Mondays off at Ruby Tuesday, which is across from the Target complex. "I don't know how we ended up there" the first time, she says. But once they did, "We all thought, 'Oh, that's kind of ironic and stupid.' " So they all stayed, and ordered ironic and stupid sangria and appetizers. Then they came back the next week and did it again. The Thai Phoon Shrimp is so cheesy and lame that they have to keep ordering it.
But at what point, someone asks Reppert, will the Thai Phoon Shrimp stop being cheesy and just start being tasty? At what point will suburban stop being ironic and just start being . . . life?
"I think," Reppert says, "I have gotten to that point."
