of the building. Public records show that the space was purchased for $3.5 million in March 2022. While Bora Architecture has provided architecture and design services mostly pro bono (save fees to a structural engineer to help with the seismic upgrade), the renovation still bore a price tag of $16.5 million. The rest, Proctor says, has gone to capacity building and building an endowment of $3 million, as well as a $1 million Board of Directors reserve and $2 million to support the Ursula K. Le Guin Writers Residency. Its programming includes administration of the Oregon Book Awards; educational programming including classes and oversight of the Writers in the Schools program; an ongoing arts and lecture series; and the Portland Book Festival. The organization’s head count has also increased rapidly — it was seven when design work began on the new building, and is currently 19. Proctor says it could expand to as many as 35. n n n According to board chair Amy Donohue, who is also a principal at Bora Architecture, the organization began looking for a new space as its staff and programming expanded and it needed more offices. Initially, the board considered simply expanding into an adjacent tenant space. But Oregon poet laureate Anis Mojgani encouraged the board to “think a little bigger,” Donohue says. Right now the public is welcome to visit Literary Arts’ downtown space, but people have to push a doorbell to come in, which “is not the most welcoming thing that you could do.” “We’re really trying to make a space where people could come in, look at books, buy a cup of coffee. Maybe they don’t even know who Literary Arts is, but they’ll find out about us when they come into the space,” she says. The new space, situated on the 700 block of Southeast Grand Avenue and originally built in 1904 as a hardware store, will include a cafe and bookstore, classroom space for writers’ workshops, and a podcast studio — where the organization will continue to record its podcast The Archive Project but also teach classes in podcast production. It’s also a long-term home for the organization, which was founded in 1984 as Portland Arts & Lectures and currently occupies office space in the Pittock Block in downtown Portland. Purchasing a new space rather than continuing to rent the space — and purchasing the space outright so that the organization wouldn’t carry any debt — has been key to the organization’s transformation. “There’s a way in which these campaigns can trickle out and go on forever, and you could end up in debt, and it can be very toxic. And we are very much on the path that that is not going to happen,” Proctor says. “I’m confident in that, actually, we’ll have no debt, no deficit, and this campaign will wind down this fall.” n n n The mid to late 1980s, Proctor says, was “an era of incredible creativity” in Portland’s arts community. “If you start looking at the history of other [Portland arts] organizations, you’ll find that their founding years are in the mid-’80s, and that’s because there was a real dearth of those organizations, and a lot of really amazing, smart, creative, industrious people started things from scratch.” Julie Mancini started Portland Arts & Lectures with the goal of bringing important writers to town Andrew Proctor describes the new Literary Arts building project. Andrew Proctor and Literary Arts board chair Amy Donohue JASON E. KAPLAN COURTESY OF LITERARY ARTS 32
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