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Powell's Books, the bookstore equivalent of like, the entire internet, which was once voted the most Portland thing in Portland, is expanding its Hawthorne location to take over the current Pastaworks on Southeast Hawthorne Boulevard.
(Full disclosure: I once worked for Powell's, and yeah, it was a dream.)
Pastaworks currently sits between Powell's Hawthorne and Home and Garden stores, but will leave that location this month to open a fancy new grocery store called Providore Fine Foods at Northeast 24th Avenue and Sandy Boulevard, next door to Tails and Trotters.
Powell's plans to finish its expansion into the new space in October, which will bridge the gap between the two current Hawthorne Powell's bookstores.
Powell's CEO Miriam Sontz couldn't yet say what the additional space would mean for the two discrete stores. "We just learned about Pastaworks vacating the space a couple months ago," she said over the phone. "We haven't even started the process [of deciding what to do in the space]; we've been so focused on the holiday season."
What Sontz does know is that when they start making plans for the expansion, they will take into account the Hawthorne store's existing space and customer base.
"We try to honor each store's integrity, and work with the structure we have around us," she says, when asked if the remodel at Hawthorne will be similar to the 2014 remodel of the flagship Burnside store.
Sontz is enthusiastic about the possibilities for the additional 7,000 square feet the Hawthorne store will have to work with—bringing the store's total size to 23,000 square feet. "We as a company will have enough ideas to fill 50,000 square feet," she says.
Powell's Books has been a Portland fixture for 45 years, somehow managing to stay standing through the Great Independent Bookstore Purge of the '90s and even grow. The company has five locations, including one at the airport, and a major online presence. Though expansion will actually take that number down to four (by bringing two together), it's a sign that the enthusiasm for words on actual paper isn't diminishing, at least in Portland.
"It's kind of a wonderful thing," says Sontz.
Willamette Week