You might wonder what those little plastic interconnecting blocks have to do with rare books. It all started with a nice sunny warm spring day here in Toronto and me not wanting to waste the good weather. I had found an interesting article about Easter Eggs on an Internet site about Toronto, and it mentioned that one of the “eggs” was a Lego Tower in the west end of downtown. Now it wasn’t a real “Easter” egg even though it was around the season, it was one of the easter eggs that are little hidden gems in something. Apparently designers and engineers like to hide little indications (easter eggs) that they designed something and as a challenge for people to find. Common in computer games and software, I recently read about them in cars and trucks. This list of Easter Eggs were of little interesting things to see in the city of Toronto and they are always a good excuse for an outing so we decided to set out on a walk to see if we could find this Lego Tower Easter Egg.
It was a bit of a walk, but the day was warm and sunny, and we set out down Church Street to Queen’s Square and on to Hobart St where the Lego Tower was supposed to be located.
This tower of Lego was apparently a project started by a local resident who decided to decorate one of the city’s lamp poles outside his house by building lego around it and as it grew it got slightly out off control until it became a “tower”; sounded interesting.
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| What is that odd tower? |
Now when exploring Toronto, you always find unexpected interesting things, and on this walk we came upon the huge slightly ugly building housing the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. Situated on a bend in the road, the building really sticks out as you walk down Hobart Street. It is a large concrete building with an imposing tall concrete tower that when you see it you can’t help wondering what it’s function is. We had seen this building from a distance on another walk and wondered what it was. The Internet tells me that it opened in 1972, and is built in the Brutalist architectural style giving it a rather industrial look. Walking by we discovered that it was a rare book library, and then rounding the corner, looking up at the tall concrete tower, we found a sign indicating that we had arrived during an open house. Two retired folk out for a walk, our time was flexible so we decided to stop in to see what it was all about.  |
| Come in and see! |
Turned out to be a interesting stop. There was a room all set for the open house with a selection of the rare books housed here. The friendly helpful staff told us all about the services the library provides. It holds around 700,000 rare books that are accessible to the public. You can go in and search their catalogue and they will bring you any volume you wish to research. Some of the books on display were fascinating so I can only imagine some of the interesting information you could find if you wished. Oh, and that odd tower on the front of the building actually serves absolutely no useful purpose. It was intended to house a clock in the original design, but as it became a reality, everyone agreed that the clock in the tower looked silly, so it is now just an empty tower.
And after our detour to explore the rare books we did find the other tower, the lego one and although like the unused clock tower it serves no useful purpose other than decorating one of Toronto’s light poles. Smaller than I expected it is basically one layer of Lego bricks in a square around the pole with windows, doors, stairs and lego people all the way up high enough that if you wished to add to it, you would need to bring a ladder. And not an actual egg in sight.
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| A pretty impressive collection |
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| Just one of the rare books |
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| The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library |
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| Yup . . . a tower of lego |
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| And it is a serious tower! |
