Meet The “Dimes Square” Of Lutherville-Timonium

BY ZOE C. ZVYAGIN

The din of laughter and fork tines makes the intimate sushi restaurant feel like a palace, my dinner companions cheers-ing with marble sodas up and down the long table. I find myself in the presence of influential, glamorous people, artists and tastemakers and literati. But we’re not in New York: we’re in Lutherville-Timonium, Maryland. It’s not a city, it’s a census-designated place—and it’s the unlikely home of the latest crop of fashionably destitute dilettantes driving media conversations nationwide.

With just a quick step outside you’ll see the dinner spot is housed in a quiet strip mall accessible only by five-lane road. Glimmering parking lot flows in all directions. For non-cars, there’s an awninged perimeter with a sidewalk. This is where I join two of them for a vape break and conversation, the sunset framed perfectly by the firehouse, CVS, and single pine tree across the street.

“We didn’t set out to like, be a thing. You can’t really do something like that on purpose,” says Poppy Henlow, a ceramicist and founding member of Times Square (short for Timonium).

“Yeah,” says Eve Pen, heir to the pen fortune. “It’s like, you can’t give yourself a nickname.”

This casualness towards their own grandeur is characteristic of the alt-wealthy. It’s a language I’ve become versed in during my time embedded with them for this report.

Other tells will be obvious to anyone who follows the cool kids of better-known zip codes: cobalt blue sweaters, dingy sneakers, flash photography of dinner plates. Mysteriously-funded jaunts into earring making and starting a newspaper. Tuscan vacations documented with only a picture of a piece of fruit. It’s all the familiar moves, just set against the backdrop of a quotidian Baltimore suburb.

The night’s still young and I’m invited to a gathering at Eve’s apartment. When we pull up it looks like an average suburban rental complex, the kind of neighborhood where you’d expect power-walkers and family annihilations. But as she turns the key in the door it becomes apparent we’re in new, old territory—she’s bought both stories and condensed them into a condo with massive ceilings, the walls decked in wainscoting like a prewar UES pad.

Stark lighting from a pink neon sign lends some grit to the prim architecture. The entertaining area is indicated by an abstract sectional and a coffee table in the same soft material. In lieu of end tables are piles of magazines with squiggly candles on top.

I get talking to Pi Paulyaar, the child of a Craiganese dictator who became a story in his own right during the nuclear standoff last summer. A tweet lamenting his dad’s “vibes” went viral and he was a hit with the broader American public, who found it at once perplexing and comforting that one of the world’s biggest villains could have such a “slay” son.

“Peace is so cunt,” says Paulyaar, who was educated at Swedish international schools before settling in Maryland for college.

Ironically, he might be closer to world domination than his notorious father: the influencer’s combined following has just surpassed ten million, even more than the population of his home country of Craigan. But make no mistake—this group doesn’t have sweeping social aims. Unlike their idealistic classmates, these Gen Z’ers eschew what they call “Gap commercial politics”: the toothless, boyfriend-jeaned positions of the Democratic party. Rather, they represent a generation that grew up in ahistorical times, where everything’s a symbol of a symbol and all civic action is probably cringe and therefore pointless.

Because of this ennui they’ve earned a reputation for being a little dangerous, using slurs in a way that would please the right while making it clear on podcasts and message thongs that they’re with the filthy, courageous left.

Our conversation is cut short by someone striking a champagne glass with a spoon. The theme of the night is Town Hall, each guest pretending to vote on motions regarding the friend group, and orations are about to begin.

Henlow, now wearing a paper crown, grabs the mic and starts railing against speed bumps. One young man who looks way too healthy and athletic to be there requests that they “rezone [his] friendship with Dahlia from hanging out to talking.” The women ooh and aah at this admission, pelting the Romeo with their own balled-up speeches.

If a detached irony is the ring most hipsters are aiming for, this crew wins by competing in another category entirely. It’s camp, one could say, to spend this much energy skewering Baltimore County bedrocks and tastes and eccentricities. To commit to an edgy life in this place just below the Mason-Dixon line, somewhere too boring to brag about but too urbanized to be like “Yeah, I’m country, so what?”

Suddenly the lights are even lower, a candle-lit cake procession having begun. It’s not a birthday party, per se, but it is Eve’s birthday—and naturally we’re going to celebrate Maryland style.✒︎