High Park Branch Offers Sanctuary to Capybaras

Who among us hasn't wanted to flee from a blind date gone bad?

Toronto Public Library wants to offer the two capybaras High Park branch as a refuge from their trials, in a spirit of fellowship and creating a warm welcoming environment.

While my grandmother spoke highly of her own arranged marriage, I'm not sure how she would have felt about the slightly sordid affair at High Park Zoo when a single male capybara was brought to meet (read mate!) two female capybaras. Faced with this situation, what choice did they have but to leave with their dignity intact a la Thelma and Louise (and who really can blame them)? The Zoo is trying to recapture them as of now.

My friend Mabel has also just informed me that in fact the escaped pair is a male and female pair so their burst for freedom is more Bonnie and Clyde and my puffery prose above is a bit misleading.

There was also an unconfirmed report that the capybaras had been seen at using the Digital Innovation Hub at Fort York Library.

By Charlesjsharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44254295



High Park is a lovely branch celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2016. In addition to an English language collection, it offers a small adult and children's collection in French and a large collection of items in Polish. There is free wifi, Internet workstations (like all branches) and they also loan out pedometers.

High Park branch is a Carnegie-funded library building and one of three iconic and identical branches spearheaded by Chief Librarian George H. Locke that are celebrating a major milestone this year -- Beaches and Wychwood are the other two branches. They were built in a pastiche of English medieval Tudor school style (big central hall open space) with wood beams/trusses and lots of white plaster.

If you're on Pinterest, you can view the many historical photos we have posted on a Carnegie Library board. Below are a few High Park branch photos, circa 1920s-40s.

High Park branch circa 1921-1922 by Muriel Page (later Ffoulkes) who was a children's librarian at High Park, Toronto Public Library from 1917 to 1922.

Toronto Public Library staff member Marjorie Bullard reads in the adult section, ensconced in the inglenook of the High Park branch's fireplace. This photograph was taken by her brother, Maurice, at Christmas-time in 1940. Marjorie worked in several branches in her 45 years of service, and retired from the Locke branch in 1973.

Wychwood Branch opened on April 15, 1916. It was the first of, and model for, of three identical libraries (High Park & Beaches were the others) that TPL built with a $50,000 grant from Carnegie. Eden Smith's design, an adaptation of Tudor Gothic style, was "an almost entire departure from the traditional library building…the Reading room & Library, 70 ft long by 30 ft wide…is really a large hall with an open timbered roof, the walls above 19 ft high to the springing of the roof..the ceiling 29 ft at its apex."

If you're interested in capybaras, you might like these two children's books:







The Picture Collection at the Arts Department of the Toronto Reference Library even has a file on capybaras - one of 32,000 files with a million images (and you can borrow from the Picture Collection).

Of course, we hope the two cabybaras are found safe but in the meantime, we also hope they're having a good time now with their freedom.