The Center for Fiction is Moving to Brooklyn
Rendering of 280 Ashland Place, future home of the Center for Fiction, by Dattner Architects and Bernheimer Architecture
The Center for Fiction, America’s only nonprofit literary organization dedicated solely to celebrating fiction, is moving its headquarters to the Brooklyn Cultural District, helping the borough usurp Manhattan as the city’s foremost destination for literary culture. Its new home, to be located at 280 Ashland Place, will include a library of more than 100,000 fiction titles, an excellent bookshop, and workspaces writers can rent. It will host writing workshops, reading groups, lectures, and panels featuring the likes of authors Joyce Carol Oates and Michael Cunningham.
The decision to move came from a desire to be at the heart of the creative hub that is the Brooklyn Cultural District. Its new neighbors will include BAM, Mark Morris Dance Center, BRIC, and UrbanGlass. “Brooklyn is home to so many great writers—both well-known and emerging—and so many of our audience members already are Brooklyn residents,” executive director Noreen Tomassi told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. “The borough may have more readers per square inch than anywhere in the country. Look at all the bookstores that thrive in Brooklyn!”
Founded in 1820, the Center for Fiction sold its original home, a historic eight-story, white marble building in midtown Manhattan, for $18 million. $5.5 million of that is paying for the just-started construction of the Center’s new 17,696-square-foot space, designed by Dattner Architects and Bernheimer Architecture. Construction is expected to wrap up in summer 2017.
