Mark and I are planning on visiting all one hundred branches in the Toronto Public Library system. So far we have seen at least a dozen different locations. We go on Sundays and bring our library passports to get stamped. These passports are privately printed and Mark got them at the spacing store. They are popular as the staff tell us they see them all the time. This was a sure moneymaker the library system missed out on. Since the TPL, like Mississauga, often employs different staff from within the system to work on Sundays, quite often we have encountered employees who normally aren’t based at the locations we visit. Thus when we present our passports, they haven’t been able to find the library’s individual ink stamp. No one has failed us, however, and a little bit of looking and asking around has always produced the stamp. I enjoy walking around the stacks and seeing how different libraries do things, for there appears to be particular branch ways of doing things versus a system-wide uniform structure. The same could be said for Mississauga. Sometimes I introduce myself as a former Mississauga library worker, to explain the reasons for my curiosity. For example, at the Pape/Danforth Library, they file most of the Danielle Steel novels under general fiction, but some of them are in a separate romance collection. Why is that? I couldn’t expect an answer right then and there so I didn’t sweat it when no one could tell me why.
Pape/Danforth Library
Yesterday Mark and I stopped in at the Pape/Danforth branch and then went to the first library I had ever visited in my life, the tiny Todmorden Room in the East York Community Recreation Centre. My first memories are of my childhood in East York, and my mother took me regularly to the Todmorden Room. The library is quite literally a single room and I had no tear-jerking moment as I set foot into the place as I already knew years ago that the community centre, and thus the library within it, had been renovated decades ago. The Todmorden Room of today is not the same place I visited in 1970.
East York Community Recreation Centre. I was last in this area on February 18, 2024 when I toured our old basement apartment and took a walk around William Burgess School and stepped into the community centre. The Todmorden Room Library was closed on Sundays back then, and it was a holiday weekend besides. The house just south of the community centre on the southeast corner of Torrens and Pape has the address 1081 Pape Avenue; I have long wondered why a building as important at the community centre should have the rather inelegant street number 1081½, when the next Pape address north of it is 1119. I am sure I can find the answer by consulting old Toronto city directories. The community centre now is likely much bigger than what it was in 1970 and there could very well have been houses in what is currently the centre’s vast parking lot south of Woodville Avenue. With my belief that the City of Toronto would be unwilling to change the address of the community centre and library after a renovation (and total razing of the property) as long as it was occupying the same block, 1081½ it would remain, although I can bet that the occupants of the house just south of it probably still get some of their mail, and vice versa.
Inside the Todmorden Room, the smallest library in the Toronto Public Library system. I am looking at the three short stacks of adult nonfiction. One employee was on site and two patrons were inside. How I wish I could go back in time to see this library as it was in 1970. I am sure the city archives have photos of it to mark its opening day, or for sure the community centre’s opening day. I have heard that the Todmorden Room was “expanded” in 1966 so my memories of it from 1970 are of a bigger place (which was pretty minuscule to begin with). Mark took the photo to show depth but a cropped close-up below shows the main collection. The only stacks not in the shot are the junior nonfiction shelf and the board books which are at the entrance by the information desk on the right.
Afterwards it was a short walk to my old house at 184 Hopedale Avenue:
In Arthur Dyson Parkette, next to the house which occupies the homepage of my website. There were no trees in this park when the photo below was taken:
We walked west on Hopedale to Minton Place, where I loved to look over at the Don Valley and the cars below. The new Ontario Line subway is under construction, so all the houses on the northeast side of Minton are gone, as well as a few Hopedale houses. A subway tunnel will be built on this site. I can only imagine what the noise or vibrations would be like for those houses not razed by the wrecking ball. We walked over the Leaside Bridge to get a better view of the construction site and the whole side of the Don Valley below Minton Place is now treeless and appears to be covered with an enormous tarp; sign of tunnel preparation in progress.
UPDATE:
I have been poring over the East York Library Board digital archives and found this passage from the East York Public Library annual report for 1971. Thus from at least 1971 the Todmorden Room address was 1081½ Pape Avenue:
