Porter Square Books is celebrating its 20th birthday with a move – but one that will take it only to Lesley University’s University Hall, around 1,000 feet away from its current Cambridge shopping plaza space.
After a 20th anniversary party Sept. 28 in its current location with its formal White Street address, the opening at 1815 Massachusetts Ave. is expected in October, said co-owner David Sandberg and the team of senior employees who in 2018 became owners of half the store.
The news was released Tuesday, another sign of the vigor of independent bookstores once declared killed by the arrival of giant chains and again by the arrival of Amazon. At 6,182 square feet, the next Porter Square Books will be 40 percent bigger.
“This move is a terrific opportunity to provide for the long-term growth of Porter Square Books,” Sandberg said, pointing to a “bigger, nicer space in an iconic building right on Mass Ave” that is closer to the Porter Square T stop and offers more café seating, two customer bathrooms and an opportunity to enhance the gathering area for its frequent author talks and other events.
The cafe that will serve in the new store is not Cafe Zing, which has decided to stay in the Porter Square Shopping Center and is looking for a new business to partner with. “It’s not a good fit for us,” Cafe Zing owner Mark Ostow said in a phone interview. “I like Porter Square too much. I like the community there.”
Zing opened in the bookstore around a year following its launch in 2004 after Ostow, a photographer, did an event there for a calendar he’d shot and liked the idea (“It kind of stunned my wife,” he recalled). It’s likely to stay much the same, putting up a temporary wall after the PSB move, Ostow said, and he might try to add a juice bar and a little more seating. “Each year we get busier and busier,” he said.
The bookstore will instead get a new coffee shop and food service by familiar owners: The Page & Leaf Cafe, which will be run by Jennifer Park and Tucker Lewis, founders of Somerville’s Diesel Cafe, Bloc Cafe and Forge Baking Co. & Ice Cream, with their chief executive and new partner in the venture, Courtney Verhaalen. “Page & Leaf Cafe is so grateful to be a part of its new home,” Park said.
Parking and potentially longer hours
If Page & Leaf agrees, the plan is to for the store to be open until 8 p.m. weekdays – adding another hour to the bookstore’s current weekday schedule – and still closing at 7 p.m. on weekends, said Josh Cook, a co-owner of PSB and its marketing director.
Size and doors that open onto the avenue aren’t the only perk the store is touting from the relocation. Owners also like the covered bike parking they will soon be able to offer and the ability to keep welcoming drivers. The university building gives free parking on nights and weekends and for the first 45 minutes on weekdays.
The bookstore, which employs 36 people and has a Boston seaport “edition” as well, will maintain its independent status despite being within the university building, Cook said. Finding a home so close by where it can add shelf space and other amenities is lucky, though: “Buying a building in the Porter Square neighborhood was never going to be a possibility for us,” he said.
The move fills two long-empty storefronts along Massachusetts Avenue, merging the former Bourbon Coffee and Webster Bank, both of which closed in 2021. The coffee shop lasted a decade; the bank branch, five years.
Good for the community
Next to the new Porter Square Books and also expected to open in the fall will be a new restaurant space opening onto the avenue, a corner entrance to the popular Japanese restaurants Yume Ga Arukara and Ittoku, which are relocating from a food court inside to fill square footage that was a Shaking Crab seafood eatery from 2017 until mid-Covid pandemic.
“I’m delighted Porter Square Books is joining other locally owned businesses in University Hall,” said Janet Steinmayer, president of Lesley University. “We can’t think of a better home.”
A bookstore is a good match for a university building, Steinmayer said, especially one that long ago lost its Barnes & Noble-run student store.
It’s good for the community too, said Ruth Ryals, president of the Porter Square Neighbors Association.
Porter Square Books “will enliven the whole place,” opening up University Hall “and making it more friendly,” Ryals said.
Signs at the shopping center
What happens at the Porter Square Shopping Center is less clear. Requests for comment went unanswered from TA Realty and Wilder, the partners who bought the plaza and eight other properties in 2022 for $390 million. The 175,687-square-foot shopping center – with its Star Market and CVS, Tags hardware and chain eateries such as a Panera Bread and Halal Bros. – has been making a series of improvements to its parking lot. A Cambridge Savings Bank branch was renovated five years ago, and the Star Market has been getting a monthslong refurbishment due for a Thursday grand opening with executives from its parent company, Albertsons.
Similarly, the owners of the health and wellness store Cambridge Naturals, the bookstore’s current neighbor, is in for the long haul. “While we are saddened at the loss of our symbiotic neighbors and friends Porter Square Books from the plaza, we are excited for their expansion, and very heartened that Cafe Zing is here to stay,” said Emily Kanter, the store’s second generation of owner. She said she was “very optimistic for the future of a robust Cambridge Naturals in the Porter Square Shopping Center. We look forward to engaging this vibrant local community for years to come.”
Neither Albertsons nor Cambridge Savings Bank were willing to reveal how much they spent on renovations. But every signal from plaza tenants and ownership is for long-term occupation of a superblock of mainly one-story structures in a city that is under immense pressure to add housing by building towers with retail at their base.
If that’s the case, Ryals said, “I hope the community can help influence what goes in there. The plaza needs an anchor like Porter Square Books.”
The bookstore’s 20th anniversary party is set for 6 to 9 p.m. Sept. 28 at its current location: 25 White St., Porter Square, Cambridge.
This post was updated Aug. 20, 2024, to add comment from Cambridge Naturals.
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Risky move – there’s a lot less foot traffic in University Hall. Lots of businesses have come and gone in that corner location.
I think it’s terrific they’re moving to a bigger space. Sometimes there have been technical issues with book readings, so that can now be improved. If they can have big signage on the street, excellent. The only issue is what will happen to the vacated space? Porter Square Books wasn’t an “anchor tenant” when they moved in, it was a risky venture to open a bookshop 20 years ago. Will someone sensing a coming trend be allowed a go at that space like they were? Or will an established corporate name brand place win out? Key would be the kind of place, like Porter Square Books, where every other person who enters spends at least $30. You read a book, you need a new one, so what kind of items get consumed like that on a regular basis? There’s already a liquor store, hardware store, grocery store, natural products store (including bulk items), a pharmacy and panera cafe. I can’t think of other things that people need to keep buying, other than socks, underwear, chocolate and haircuts. But Cafe Zing won’t want to share a space with an underwear store or haircutters (and Cambridge Naturals already stocks terrific chocolate).
I love porter books and the idea of an indie cafe in that space, have missed bourbon which was great. The coffee shop should get plenty of foot traffic especially from Lesley. However, I fear the bookstore will lose casual traffic since parking is tight there- four or five spots now? often taken by one off duty cop who never pays the meter while they work out, and a few enormous SUVs with livery plates who never pay for parking either.
I wonder if the limit of 45 minutes of free parking will discourage customers just looking to browse?