Tuesday Treasures

 Tom the backroads traveller hosts this weekly meme.

September 2025 - Toronto ON

From our excursion to The Beach area.

Beaches Branch was constructed at the northeast corner of Kew Gardens on a site provided by the City of Toronto, despite opposition from local residents and the Parks Committee to having a building on park property. Mayor Tommy Church laid the cornerstone for the new library on October 29, 1915. It replaced a storefront library that the Toronto Public Library Board had opened on Queen Street East at the northeast corner of Hambly Avenue on February 23, 1914.

Beaches was the last of three identical branches (Wychwood and High Park were the other two) that the Toronto Public Library built with a $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Chief Librarian George Locke described the design by Eden Smith & Sons "after the fashion of the Collegiate Grammar School of the Seventeenth Century in England," as "a decided revolt in style from the traditional library architecture".

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One-ton cast bronze owl designed by architect Phillip H. Carter and artisan Ludzer Vandermolen installed at the branch entrance, 7 July 2005.

Designed in 17th-century English Collegiate style, Beaches Branch by Kew Gardens replaced a storefront library opened in 1914 at the corner of Queen Street East and Hambly Avenue. The new building was one of three nearly identical libraries (together with Wychwood and High Park) built with a $50,000 grant to the Toronto Public Library from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. George Locke, the chief librarian, wanted the three buildings to "bring to the mind of the people of the outlying districts some recollection of their Scottish and English village type of architecture." The Toronto architecture firm Eden Smith and Sons completed the design, "a decided revolt" from the Classical styling of earlier Carnegie libraries. The brick and stone building features an upper floor modelled on a Tudor Gothic great hall. It boasts a soaring hammer-beamed ceiling, a plain stone fireplace, lead-glass casement windows, and a minstrel gallery. The west wing, built when the library was renovated and restored in 2005, replaces this 1980 addition.