Bibliothèque Centrale de Montréal

Building upon the legacy of subscription libraries and Mechanics’ Institutes, public libraries (as democratic, publicly-funded institutions) started appearing across North America towards the end of the 19th century. In the British colonies that would soon become Canada, the legal framework for this development was the 1882 Ontario public libraries act, soon replicated in the other provinces. In 1899, the first public municipal library in Quebec opened in Westmount.

Inspired by the development of openly accessible libraries within English-speaking Canada, francophone liberals founded the Institut Canadien de Montréal in 1844. The Institute operated a debating room for its members, as well as a French language public library of 2000 volumes. This was however a direct challenge to the cultural hegemony then imposed by the Roman Catholic Church on the French-speaking (and overwhelmingly Catholic) minority. The conflict between the Church and the Institut crystallized when a minority of members attempted to weed the library collection of works which Rome considered immoral. The Institut‘s refusal to cave in led to the creation of a competing Institut canadien-français de Montréal, controlled by the clergy, but relations continued to sour. When Joseph Guibord, a prominent member of the Institut, died in 1869, church officials flatly refused to bury him. Even though the burial was finally permitted, after a lengthy judicial and political saga, the controversy was fatal to the Institut, which closed its library in 1881 after attempts to transfer it to the city failed.

Montreal society by then was largely segregated along linguistic, religious and socioeconomic lines, each with their own set of institutions. Any development within this volatile complex was difficult, in particular in matters of cultural significance such as education and libraries. Several attempts to establish a public library were unsuccessful, including a Carnegie grant obtained by mayor Raymond Préfontaine only to be turned down by the municipal council. Finally, a budget was allocated to open a small “scientific and industrial” publicly-funded francophone library, which opened in a small room inside the Monument-National theatre in 1903. In the following years, its librarian Éva Circé(-Côté) was able to discreetly expand the strict confines of its mandate by adding works of music and literature, although the latter were swiftly criticized by the Bishop of Montreal for including such morally dubious authors as Voltaire and Balzac. Nevertheless, the expanded collection was highly popular and the library’s original location soon proved too small. The addition of 10,000 rare books acquired from the collection of archivist Philéas Gagnon further pushed the boundaries, and the library moved to the École Technique (now part of UQÀM) on Sherbrooke St. in 1911. In 1913, under pressure from liberal council members, the city finally voted a budget of $500,000 to build a proper public library for francophone Montrealers.

The Bibliothèque Municipale was inaugurated on May 13, 1917 in a magnificent Beaux-Arts building designed by Eugène Payette. Behind the facade’s monumental Italian Renaissance columns, the library opened to a large marble-clad service hall lit by a stained glass skylight bearing the arms of prominent Quebecois historical figures, the French regions of origin of the first settlers, and the other Canadian provinces. Reading rooms on either side of the hall provided well-lit seating areas where patrons could consult materials ordered from the closed stacks at the back of the library. Simpler in design, a five-story book storage tower protruded to the back of the library, fitted with the cast-iron Snead bookshelf system. Accessible through a side entrance, a children’s library was planned underneath the main library, but it only opened in 1941.

Starting in 1947, the municipal library was joined by a growing network of branch libraries, and began to be known as the Bibliothèque Centrale. Although beloved by the population, the building proved difficult to adapt to the changing needs of library patrons, in particular due to the inability to convert the book storage block into more reading areas, as the dense Snead bookcases are an intrinsic part of the building’s structure and can’t be removed. An extension added in the 1980s did little to resolve the situation, and it was determined that a new building was required. As there was also a need for a new building to house the Quebec national archives, a common project emerged to combine the two institutions. In 2005, the library collections moved to the BAnQ Grande Bibliothèque and the former municipal library building, renamed Édifice Gaston Miron, was taken over by the Montreal Arts Council in 2009. Reading rooms were transformed into offices and rehearsal studios, but the main hall was kept open to the public and regularly hosts arts exhibits.

The book storage block at the back was also reused in a most unusual way. After holding part of the Quebec national archives for a while, it was taken over in 2016 by Le Grand Costumier, a non-profit established to manage the former CBC Studios’ costume collection. The venerable Snead bookshelves were partly modified to support more than 100,000 costumes and accessories, available to professional film and theatre productions.

The images shown here date from my visit in February 2024. I’m very grateful to Le Grand Costumier for letting me visit their treasure trove.

This post is part of a series on adaptive reuse in libraries. See the list of such projects I am maintaining or view other posts in this series.

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