If you’ve lived in Orléans for any amount of time, and like to visit the library, you might have noticed this curious fact. The issue? The only two Ottawa Public Library (OPL) branches east of the Greenbelt are located in the neighbourhoods sandwiched between the Queensway and Innes Road.
The two branches now serving Orléans are both indirectly inherited from the municipalities that used to own them before Amalgamation in 2001. These are the Orléans branch, on Orléans Blvd between Beauséjour Drive and Boyer Road, and the Cumberland branch, located at the Ray Friel Recreation Complex on Tenth Line Road.
Here’s a fun historical fact: the Orléans branch used to be part of the Gloucester Public Library network that was previously located in the Bob Macquarrie/Orléans Recreation Complex on Youville and Jeanne d’Arc. When I first came to live in Ottawa in the 1980’s, it was in this little cubby-hole off the Youville-facing entrance and the stacks were high enough to make you wonder if they might bury you should there be an earthquake.
As for the Cumberland Branch, this was originally the Cumberland Public Library. When I started using it, it was part of the building housing both Sir Wilfrid Laurier High School and the Ray Friel Recreation Complex. Eventually, a larger addition was made to the complex to better serve the still-growing post-Amalgamation clientele.
Personally, both of these branches serve me well enough. I don’t get to visit the Orléans Branch nearly as much, as it’s further from where I live. However, Cumberland Branch is only a ten-minute walk for me, which is really convenient as a regular visitor. But I’ve noticed there are gaps in the network.
Today, there’s no OPL branch set up to conveniently serve the people living north of the Queensway or the people living south of Innes Road. Both of those regions of Orléans are rapidly growing in population, even if growth might seem slow looking a year at a time. And both the Queensway and Innes Road can act as real physical barriers to accessing OPL service.
One population that is rightly a priority target audience for our library branches – kids and teenagers – have no or very few safe ways to cross these major roads without just asking for a ride from Mom or Dad. Library branches embedded in these communities would make them much more accessible for people who are less likely to drive or have access to a car, but is also more convenient for anybody to be able to easily walk or bike if they so choose. If need be, we can look to the Blackburn Hamlet and Elmvale branches hosted in shopping malls, for an interim solution.
Mind you, this wasn’t done intentionally. Both of the existing facilities were set up in earlier decades, when Orléans as a whole was more compact and yet divided between two municipalities. Compact, or if you prefer, easier to travel from one end to the other quickly. Not any longer, though. It will be a good thing to set aside space, given both urban sprawl in the south, and intensification in the north, for at least two new branches of OPL to be built.
We might even want to look ahead to days when urban sprawl – try as we still must to contain it – will take us well past Trim Road to the east. Are we planning for that as well?
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Editors Note: If you want to take a deeper dive on the history of the library branches in the eastern part of the city as they moved around, I am already working on a follow-up to this post doing just that. Stay tuned and subscribe below so you don’t miss it.
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