Columbia Heights Hipsters Stumble Into Target Territory

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."