Another problem with that damned Post article about the Columbia Heights Target is that by moving out of Columbia Heights I’m apparently just adding another statistic to some sloppy reporter’s next article about living in a trendy neighborhood.
I moved into Columbia Heights ten years ago, within two weeks of the opening of the brand new Metro station. The location of the Target was an empty lot with a facade held up by I-beams, except for a grim little strip of stores on the corner of 14th & Park.
Whenever I walk down to 14th between Irving and Park now, I don’t recognize it as the neighborhood I moved into, but I don’t see this as a bad thing at all. We’re moving out of Columbia Heights (in one sense, at least) not out of any hipster dissatisfaction with the debodegafication of the neighborhood (in fact, we’d love to stay, and we’re not moving far), but out of a desire to have a nice place, where we are quite literally getting in on the ground floor. We shop at the Target almost weekly. We were members at the gym before it even opened. We’ve earned uncounted free treats at Rita’s. Count us among those who are happy to have DCUSA and the rest of the new construction that rose up around the Metro.
In fact, we’re so happy with all that that we’re doing it all over again, moving into a building with emtpy space on the ground floor where the retail will be, with an empty lot across the street and another across the corner, with a crappy grocery store just down the street, and so on. We know it worked out well in Columbia Heights, and we expect it to work out just as well in Petworth.
Hipsters and lazy newspaper writers be damned, we like all that stuff, and always have.
