After serving the Riverwest neighborhood for 46 years, beloved bookstore and poetry hub Woodland Pattern will move to Bay View this fall.
Woodland Pattern will make the move from its longtime home at 720 E. Locust St. to 347 E. Ward St. in Bay View. The Bay View location is the former home of book-binding business The Bindery, which closed in summer 2025.
The Woodland Pattern news was first revealed in a series of Milwaukee Journal Sentinel articles. On Thursday, the bookstore made a statement on social media. Here it is:
For years, our organization has been working to address the many shortcomings of our beloved yet aging building in Riverwest, which has structural issues, is inaccessible to wheelchair users, and lacks sufficient space for our staff, programs, books, and the public.
In 2019, we began renovation planning with architecture firm HGA, but then boom—the world shut down. By the time our work could resume (2021) and the renderings were complete (2023), costs had skyrocketed. Worse, the price tag was going to keep rising. So, we hit the pause button—or rather the pause button hit us.
Now we’ll fast forward to 2025, when we were—to our surprise—ready to seize a bittersweet opportunity when it appeared in a different neighborhood: Bay View.
The Bindery—a former partner—closed its doors last summer, and owner Zach Lifton put the 8,896 sq. foot space on the market. Fully accessible and historically tied to book making, it offered a spacious, turnkey solution for a fraction of the cost of our renovation plans. Even better, it required a single move (as opposed to two)—reducing disruption to programs and requiring no long-term displacement.
So, after 46 years in Riverwest, Woodland Pattern is moving, and we’re all emotional about it. Fortunately there’s time for a long goodbye and a slew of events that will pay homage to this incredible place.
And there is one more thing we’d like to say.
As the caretakers of an Upper Midwest poetry center, our hearts have been in Minneapolis/St Paul all week, especially as we think about the poet Renee Good and her wife, Becca, whose statement about Renee’s death both sears and uplifts us.
“Renee lived by an overarching belief: there is kindness in the world and we need to do everything we can to find it where it resides and nurture it where it needs to grow… We honor her memory by living her values: rejecting hate and choosing compassion, turning away from fear and pursuing peace, refusing division and knowing we must come together to build a world where we all come home safe to the people we love.”
Woodland Pattern is a house of poetry that tends these values, one that is created by all of you. Thank you for helping make our house a home.
Woodland Pattern’s annual Poetry Marathon & Benefit is scheduled for January 24 and 25. The hybrid event will feature live performances at Saint Kate – The Arts Hotel, plus virtual performances.
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