As we began touring the new Literary Arts headquarters in the Central Eastside, which is nearing the end of construction and targeting an early November opening, executive director Andrew Proctor warned he might start to “blow through this like an auctioneer. I’ve been giving this tour a lot recently.”
Proctor’s speedy narration was not just from being a well-practiced tour guide, but also because there is a lot to show off. Approaching completion as the organization celebrates its 40th anniversary, this new 14,000-square-foot space offers greater visibility, with a Grand Avenue storefront, than Literary Arts’ old headquarters in downtown’s Pittock Block office building. It has more room for classrooms and staff, as well as an in-house bookstore, 75-seat auditorium, and a café, the latter conceived by Olympia Provisions culinary director Nate Tilden. It’s also owned rather than rented. The building’s two-story main space, bathed in natural light from the storefront’s wall of glass, gives way to a surrounding mezzanine: an ideal balance between spacious and cozy.
OREGON CULTURAL HUBS: An occasional series
Proctor’s fast-talking narration was also partly due to simple enthusiasm. A recent cancer survivor who is healthy following last year’s medical leave, he’s leading this nonprofit’s expansion when many arts organizations are shrinking or facing hard times. There’s a lot to be thankful for, and a lot to get ready for. After all, Connie Chung and Malcolm Gladwell will soon be in town for lectures.
UNCOVERING SEISMIC CHANGE
Our tour revealed the circa-1904 building’s newly unveiled historic details and textures, including its exposed brick walls, some showing faded but still-legible ghost signs for previous occupants (Citizens Bank, Lambert & Sargent Real Estate). New steel bracing will keep the structure standing in an earthquake.
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In the 1970s, this building’s historic front façade and clerestory windows were covered with concrete, an architectural equivalent of Han Solo being frozen in carbonite. But this renovation — begun in 2018 as a speculative redevelopment with the concrete over-cladding’s removal, then resumed last year when Literary Arts took ownership (overseen by Bora Architecture & Interiors) — has made the 120-year-old structure look better and more authentic than it has for generations.
“As you walk around, you can see we really leaned into the existing great bones in this building,” explained Bora Architects principal Amy Donohoe, who is also chair of the Literary Arts board of directors. “It’s like true stories, right? We’re going to just sort of tell the story of this building.” The renovation is also forward-thinking and green, with rooftop solar panels providing 20 percent of the building’s power, and a conversion to all-electric meaning no fossil fuels are used.
All over town, unreinforced masonry buildings face uncertain futures, needing costly seismic upgrading that developers complain doesn’t pencil out. Yet Literary Arts has taken a longer-term view.
“For-profit developers are looking to get in and out in a pretty short time period, [and] to produce a profit at the end of that,” Proctor said. “When our original broker was looking at our cost per square foot, they were like, ‘You can’t do that,’ because they were thinking about us like a for-profit developer who was going to flip the building in five or 10 years. But if you imagine you’re going into a building for 50 years, the kinds of choices you make about design, about seismic, about finishes: It’s a very different mindset. And that’s also how you talk to your donor community about it. You talk to them about this is a permanent home for the organization.”
Literary Arts’ move could be construed as another loss for downtown Portland. Though downtown foot traffic and urban vibrance has substantially improved since the dark days of 2020-21, commercial and retail vacancies still abound. Yet in Portland, as in all cities, there is a flip side: invigoration of surrounding neighborhoods and suburbs. The Central Eastside is a case in point, for Literary Arts’ move comes amidst a wave of new construction here, from offices and apartments to retail and restaurants.
Though the new Literary Arts headquarters sits on Grand Avenue, which is essentially a highway with the attendant automobile traffic, “Behind us is all of Southeast Portland,” Proctor added. “There’s a great music venue on the corner. There’s a vegan place next to us. You can see all these apartments they are building. You’re talking about an Inner Southeast residential zone, which isn’t well served in a lot of ways. There’s actually a fair amount of density, in all these big buildings. So we have to capture that.”
CAPACITY AND CONNIE
As we visited a succession of public spaces and staff offices, Proctor continually returned to the point that renovating this building represents “seismic change, pun intended, in the organization’s capacity to serve the community. Not only do you have areas for people to come and hang out and read and write and meet each other; you have more formal spaces for teaching and work than we’ve ever had before.”
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When Bora began designing Literary Arts’ new headquarters, “there was a staff of seven. We now have a staff of 19. We’ll grow to as many as 35,” Proctor said. “This is a story about architecture. It’s also a building about an institution, building a massive amount of capacity, at a time when a lot of organizations, frankly, are actually losing capacity. So we’re moving in the opposite direction, and we have every reason to think that’s going to be very successful for a variety of reasons.”
I asked Proctor how Literary Arts was able to go into expansion mode when so many other nonprofits have struggled and their resources have dwindled. In Seattle, for example, a similar literary organization, Hugo House, built its own headquarters in 2018, but is now so strapped for money after three years of financial losses that permanent closure is openly being discussed.
Proctor said Literary Arts is different because it’s more diversified. Hugo House is “wholly designed for the writing community. Its revenue model is built on everyone taking classes,” he said. “Its constituency is important, but narrow, right? When you’re talking about fundraising, that’s tough.”
Literary Arts, on the other hand, has its hands in a variety of initiatives. The organization was founded in 1984 as Portland Arts and Lectures, which continues to bring literary and media heavyweights to town; this fall’s lineup, for example, includes iconic CBS newscaster Connie Chung as well as writers Amy Tan, Malcolm Gladwell, and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
In 1993, Portland Arts and Lectures merged with Oregon Institute for Literary Arts, taking on its current name and assuming control of the Oregon Book Awards. In 1996, the organization launched Writers in the Schools, which today serves more than 4,000 students annually. In 2014, Literary Arts acquired the Wordstock festival, since renamed the Portland Book Festival, which will take place this year on Nov. 2. And earlier this year, the estate of famed sci-fi novelist Ursula K. Le Guin donated her longtime Northwest Portland home to Literary Arts, to become a new writer’s residency.
Particularly through the 1993 merger, they “created something very unusual in the United States,” Proctor said, “which is an organization that had a big audience, a big constituency. The work that’s come later has not been fighting that process but actually building on it.
“So, we took over the festival, we launched a radio show [The Archive Project, on OPB]. Those things were building out big audiences, right? Big constituency. On the other side of that, the organization built out classes and workshops over the last 10 years and began to serve the writing community in a very different way. And then the third pillar of our mission is this very large-scale service to youth. It’s 4,000 kids. It’s every single high school.”
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By adding the more public-facing new Grand Avenue headquarters, with its event space and bookstore, as well as the Le Guin house, Literary Arts becomes “an organization of great complexity with also a lot of revenue players,” Proctor said. “I’m not suggesting, believe me, that bookstores are going to solve all our financial problems. But it will be the largest literary center with the most diverse programming in the nation. When you have events and you have classes, but you also have a bookstore, you’re selling a bit of coffee, and then you have this big constituency to go out and talk to about your message, you have fundamentally shifted the dynamics.”
FROM DONOR TO DOCTOR
Like nearly all businesses and nonprofits, Literary Arts faced unprecedented uncertainty in 2020. When the pandemic began, the organization lost nearly half of its revenue overnight when its events were canceled. “I used to cry after every executive committee meeting,” Donohue remembered.
Yet by this time, Literary Arts had already spent two years exploring possibilities for adding space and capacity. “It was just going to be a small expansion, and then people started asking, ‘Should we do something more?’ We were growing so much,” Donohue said. “Then we had a very generous donor come forward and really make it possible to buy a building and make this transformative.”
Before arts advocate and Literary Arts board member Susan Hammer died in 2020, she bequeathed $3 million to the organization. As lockdown subsided, “It became clear that there was a way to turn the negative energy of the pandemic,” Proctor said. “It’s a little bit like judo, where you use the weight of your opponent to fling them. But first we had to break out of the doldrums and frustration and fear and tragic sadness. We had to say, ‘No, actually this is the time to do this project.’”
The turning point came in 2022, when Literary Arts hosted its first post-lockdown event, The Moth, featuring groups of storytellers presenting their personal histories. As the audience filed out, “this person grabbed me by the arm really hard,” Proctor remembered. “She said, ‘I’m an emergency room doctor. I spent the last three years in the emergency COVID ward, and I’ve been waiting for this. I’m so glad. This really is important for me to be able to do my work.’”
Proctor invited the doctor to a Literary Arts staff meeting to share her story. “She talked about this idea that there are things that are urgent and there are things that are important, and they are sometimes overlapping and sometimes they’re not overlapping,” he said. “And if you only do urgent things, you’ll be doing them pretty poorly.” Arts and cultural events, the doctor added, gave her and others inspiration and enrichment they needed.
“That was the beginning of our morale switch,” Proctor said, “where it was possible for the organization psychologically to embrace actually building something in the ruins of the pandemic. She helped us cross this psychological barrier.”
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The pandemic wasn’t the only barrier to overcome. Last fall, Proctor took a leave of absence to receive treatment for colon cancer. Following radiation and chemotherapy, he was back at work before the end of the year. Though thankful that doctors caught the cancer early, Proctor was also helped by his own discipline and hard work. He’s long bicycled about 100 miles a week, which he kept up during chemotherapy, even if it meant occasionally pulling to the side of the road for a moment of nausea. An interim director, Eric Vines, helped keep Literary Arts on course.
That a new headquarters was nearing completion during Proctor’s health crisis may have seemed like the worst-possible timing. Yet like Susan Hammer’s gift and the doctor’s vote of confidence, opportunity accompanied crisis: to embrace with all the more enthusiasm the organization’s new chapter.
It’s no wonder I could barely keep up with Proctor touring the new Literary Arts headquarters. As the many writers this nonprofit works with understand, the more a story’s plot thickens, the more its resolution delights.
