A Streetcar Named Library    By Alex Mair
Excerpted from Gateway City: Stories from Edmonton's Past. Reprinted with permission of Fifth House Publishers.

(EA-160-794) Photo reproduced with permission from the City of Edmonton Archives

There are so many things in this city of ours that we take for granted, and one of them is the easy access we enjoy to books, and libraries, and reading. We have a happy history of books and libraries in Edmonton, and some very innovative “firsts” about which we should be very proud. There was a biographical program on Andrew Carnegie on one of our cable television channels a few days ago, but not all of the viewers realized that this famous old rascal had an impact on this city.

Edmonton readers got together during the last few months of the 19th century and decided that they had best form a committee to look into the question of establishing some sort of library in the town. That committee came into being on Jan. 1, 1900, and we’ve gone ahead ever since.

The first library was more of a place to sit and read rather than a separate building. It was a year later, Jan. 17, 1901, that this first Reading Room opened in a building at 101 Street and Jasper Avenue.

A little more than a year later, in March 1902, the Edmonton Public Library and Mechanics Institute came into being. With an impressive title like that, it was only a matter of time before it moved into the next stage of supplying reading material to the citizens of the town. In August of that year, the new “library” opened two days a week in rooms rented in the McLeod Building in downtown Edmonton. The library must have been among the first tenants in Kenny McLeod’s new building, because it wasn’t totally completed until 1914. There were a grand total of 85 people who signed up as members of this Institute. They paid a membership fee of $3. That entitled each member to have access to the complete collection of the Institute - 100 books, 16 newspapers and a few magazines.

(EA-362-56) Photo reproduced with permission from the City of Edmonton Archives

Our next formal library was located in the Chisholm Block, again in the heart of downtown Edmonton, at 104 Street and Jasper. It was on March 27, 1913, that the first books were circulated from that library in the Chisholm Block.

Across the river in Strathcona things were moving ahead just as fast, if not faster. The Strathcona Public Library opened in March of the same year, and came into being thanks to a grant of $15,000 from Andrew Carnegie. This wealthy philanthropist was the financial spark behind the library building that’s still in use on 104 Street in 1997.

In 1922, after some considerable negotiating, the Andrew Carnegie Corporation and the City of Edmonton announced that they were, together, going to finance and build a permanent library. The site had been acquired earlier, in 1910, and reserved for a library building. It was right about where McCauley Plaza is today.

This new permanent public library building officially opened Aug. 30, 1923, and an interesting historical construction note enters the story. This new library building was constructed by a firm called Poole Construction, the first project of a new contracting firm headed by Ernest Poole.

And on another historical note, it was the same firm, Poole Construction, that demolished the building 46 years later. And it was the same firm, Poole Construction, that built the A.G.T. Tower on the same site.

On the last day of September, 1967, we moved into the new Centennial Library on Sir Winston Churchill Square.

The story of our library system in Edmonton isn’t just a story of buildings. Back in 1941, for example, the librarian, Hugh Gourlay, talked to the Street Railway people, and out of that conversation came North America’s first car library. It seems that other centres had used buses to move library books around, but Mr. Gourlay took the concept one step further, and the result was a converted streetcar that carried a comprehensive library to communities in a variety of areas in Edmonton.

It was on a Friday, Oct. 10, 1941, that the first Library car went on display at the corner of 101 Street and Jasper. Edmonton’s Mayor Fry held an official opening that night and, four days later, on Oct. 14, more than 5,000 people had visited this movable library.

The shelves down the outside walls of the car held 1,500 books, but the Public Library had purchased 3,000 new books to be used in the streetcar to keep the shelves stocked. The idea was to take the books to parts of the city where access to the downtown library was limited, and it worked more effectively than anyone had dared hope.

The first trip, out to Calder, took place on Oct. 17, 1941, and the car was parked on siding built for that purpose on 127 Avenue opposite the CN yards. And how well did the new concept work? On the first day the library car was open from 3 p.m. until 9 p.m. and 700 people came to visit. Half of the callers were new customers, and what is even more significant is the fact that 75% of the clients were children.

The same success story was told wherever the new service was offered. Another first for Edmonton, and a story that isn’t often told.