How Washington Became Obsessed With Pop-Ups

In recent months, Washingtonians have taken the air in a pop-up “parklet” and popped into a pop-up cat cafe. Some have even attended pop-up weddings at the National Museum of Natural History. Where did the pop-up revolution come from?

Pop-up stores caught on in the 1990s as quickie marriages of convenience between Halloween costumers and Christmas shops and landlords with vacant storefronts: The flash retailers got a no-commitment place to sell reindeer headbands; real-estate owners got a few weeks’ rent for fallow properties.

In 2002, big-box retailers such as Target, tiptoeing into urban markets, experimented with temporary locations, as did high-end labels like Commes de Garçons. By 2009, when Target’s pop-up debuted in Georgetown, the Washington Post was still appending “so-called” to the term. But the qualifier has come off as a blitz of restaurants, art happenings, and, recently, Ferguson, Missouri-related protests put it into circulation as a noun and a verb—Chez le Commis will pop up at Le Bon Cafe on Nov. 17, Washington City Paper announced last fall—and, at last, as a cliché. “At some point, marketing people started saying, ‘If we call it a pop-up, people will come,’” says Svetlana Legetic of the online magazine Brightest Young Things. “It became such a catchall that it means nothing.”

If “pop-up’s” fizz has generally gone flat, in Washington it’s downright negative. In 2007, a rowhouse renovation at Upshur Street and New Hampshire Avenue added an extra floor, breaking the street’s otherwise even roofline; on the Prince of Petworth blog (now called PoPville), a commenter bemoaned the “third-floor popups.” For NIMBY activists, “pop-up” has since become weaponized—and capitalized, as in former DC Council member Jim Graham’s rendering, POP-UP, when he wrote in 2013 on a U Street listserv about his plan to ban pop-ups, evoking James Bond’s villainous opponent, SPECTRE.

Last June, a developer told the Post, “I put too much thought and work into my homes to call it a pop-up.”

But it’s this sense of a glib putdown that seems destined to live on in Washington. Like those annoying ads that pop up on cheap websites, it’s gotten under our skin.

Benny B. Peterson

Benny B. Peterson is a contributing editor for Washingtonian.