Literary center moves into the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative

This week the management team at Just Buffalo Literary Center packed up their desks and moved from the Market Arcade into new offices at the Western New York Book Arts Collaborative on Washington Street.

The move will vastly increase Just Buffalo’s office space. More importantly, for the first time in its history, Just Buffalo will have its own event and performance space. By September, most of Just Buffalo’s calendar of literary events—excepting the Babel series, which is relocating from Babeville to Kleinhans—will take place at WNYBAC.

Just Buffalo began looking for new offices last year, when BERC, the city development agency that owns the Market Arcade, informed Just Buffalo and the CEPA Gallery, which share business operations and administrative personnel under a happy, long-standing cooperative agreement, that their rents would soon be doubled. CEPA and Just Buffalo began looking for new space, and were joined in that search by the Big Orbit Gallery. The three arts outfits contemplated an ambitious project at ArtSpace, the studio complex on Main Street in Midtown, but that promising collaboration evaporated as the stock market self-destructed, putting a squeeze on charitable giving to culturals.

In the meantime, WNYBAC opened its doors to great fanfare and success, and it seemed a natural fit that Just Buffalo should move into some of its excess space. Just Buffalo and CEPA will continue to share administrative and business staff, who will remain in the Market Arcade. Just Buffalo’s directors—Laurie Dean Torrell, Michael Kelleher, and Barbara Cole—will move into the new space.

As for CEPA, the gallery successfully renegotiated BERC’s rent increase, and so continues in its current home. At least for the present. Stay tuned.

—geoff kelly