The penultimate Toronto Public Library I called on was one of its smallest: Swansea Memorial. This compact and attractive branch occupies one room on the upper floor of Swansea’s City Hall, where it has resided for fifty-one years. (Previously, it was located in Swansea Public School from 1919 to 1959). With only 1,127 square feet of floor space, what Swansea Memorial lacked in elbow room was made up for in historical flavour. Even its big wooden table had a history. A carpenter named S. Haslam built it in 1926.
I liked the pioneering feel to this venerable library; it evoked the one-room schoolhouses I read about in Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables. (By the way, L. M. Montgomery actually lived in the village of Swansea from 1935 until her death in 1942, as Mary Henley Rubio details in Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (446)).
In contrast to the solid, sober table was the tie-dyed kite on the ceiling. This piece of hippy whimsy might have been an attempt to soften the military associations of the library’s name. From a leaflet about Swansea Memorial Library’s history, I learned that credit for its inception belongs to the Women’s Patriotic League of Swansea, who wanted to honour the freshly-returned veterans of the First World War as well as the soldiers who had not survived.
My last act of homage was to study the folksy mural on the outer wall of the library. I loved the lively colours and the way the art piece transformed the interior of an official municipal building into a friendly community space. What an appropriate spot to contemplate my next-to-last TPL branch!
