Local History & Genealogy

Toronto Public Library helps celebrate Leaside 100

 

The Leaside neighbourhood is celebrating its 100^th anniversary this year. It was incorporated as a town by an act of the provincial legislature passed on April 23, 1913.

The centennial festivities include an archival exhibit, the Layers of Leaside, that explores the area’s cultural landscape over many years.

The exhibit will be on display at Toronto Public Library's Leaside Branch from Tuesday April 23 to Sunday April 28, 2013. (The branch will be open for regular service, 1:30 to 5, on that Sunday only.)

Jane Pitfield and Geoff Kettel will lead several historical walking tours in connection with the exhibit, including one on Sunday April 28 from 1:30 to 3:30 starting and ending at Leaside Library.

The Leaside 100 committee used some materials for its exhibit from the collections of the Toronto Public Library.  Geoff Kettel found the Toronto neighbourhoods map on the library’s website especially helpful to locate materials quickly.  “The library has the most accessible collections of all of the resources we used,” he claimed.  The neighbourood map links users to library records about Leaside and neighbouring Thorncliffe Park, which became part of the town in 1954. 

These include digital pictures and photographs of Leaside from the Special Collections Department, Toronto Reference Library. Dating back to 1900, the majority of the images were created in the 1940s and 1950s by James Victor Salmon (1911-1958), a gifted amateur photographer who lived in Leaside for part of that time. His images of buildings, streetscapes and events are an invaluable record of the town’s mature phase of development after the Second World War.

Catalogue records for books about Leaside and Thorncliffe Park also are provided on the library's website.  Most titles are available for reference in the Leaside Branch Local History Collection.  Housed in the Leaside Room, the collection also includes pictures, maps and scrapbooks that library staff has gathered from a variety of sources over the years.  

Toronto's community newspapers are an important but often overlooked source of local information. Leaside Branch has several local papers. The Leaside Advertiser, published from 1941 until about 1999, claimed to be "Leaside's home newspaper - the ONLY published and printed in the town" in 1960 when our holdings begin. Current papers in the collection include Leaside-Rosedale Town Crier, which started in 1981 as the Leaside Villager, and Leaside Life News.  Microfilm copies of some titles are available at the Toronto Reference Library. There are some gaps in the library's holdings, and we would appreciate hearing from anyone who could help us fill them.  

Not surprisingly, the history of library service in Leaside is well documented at Leaside Branch. Key resources are photographs of library services and facilities, and annual reports of the Leaside Public Library Board, which operated from 1944 to 1967 when the Town of Leaside joined with the Township of East York to form the Borough of East York.

A selection of materials from the Leaside Branch Local History Collection will be added to Toronto Public Library’s Digital Archive later this year.