28
HAPPENINGS
Photo by Susan De Vries.
Literary Center Moves to Fort Greene
When the Center for Fiction opened in 1821, dues
were $2 a year. Founded as a membership library
meant to prepare young men for the mercantile
trade, it bounced around a number of Manhattan
locations and hosted writers such as Mark Twain,
who in 1872 attracted a crowd so large for a lecture
that he had to do it twice in one night — the second
time around for the angry audience that had been
turned away at the door.
The Mercantile Library of New York changed its
name to the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction and
renewed its longstanding focus on fiction in 2005. By
then, it was located on 47th Street on the Upper East
Side, in a building the organization sold nine years
later for $18 million. When the possibility of a sale
was announced, people began to worry. The center’s
events, always well attended, provided access to a
world of literature unattainable elsewhere. There were
reading groups, space for writers to work, the extensive
circulating library and a bookstore. Would it all
disappear?
Not quite. Instead, the Center for Fiction is expanding.
In October, the nonprofit is moving to an 18,000-
square-foot space in Fort Greene. Joining an increasing
arts-centric neighborhood — BAM, Mark Morris
Dance Group, and Theatre for a New Audience are
all nearby — will certainly boost the organization’s
profile, and the additional space will offer a cafe, a
larger bookshop and an auditorium for live events.
A bigger reading room and more classrooms and space
for writers will also be available in the new location.
With a growing number of bookstores and the imminent
arrival of the Center for Fiction’s new headquarters,
it’s becoming harder to deny the pull of literary
Brooklyn. The cliché of the writer scribbling away at an
unfinished novel in a coffee shop might be overblown,
but for the city’s readers and writers, the borough has
become a destination they can’t avoid. —C.H.
Rendering by BKSK Architects.