Sense and Social Control in Vancouver’s Carnegie Free Library, 1901–1910

In November 1903 the Vancouver Carnegie Free Library officially opened, nearly three years after the Scottish-American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie offered $50,000 to city for the construction of a public library. The library’s construction occurred during a shift in the city’s socio-geographic form from East to West, industrial to commercial, a shift resulting from an early twentieth-century engagement with urban reform in which improved sanitation, funding for public works, and city beautification were all of concern for cities across North America. Early histories of the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) situate the construction of the Carnegie Library within this reform moment inasmuch as libraries promoted an intellectual tradition newly accessible to the working class. Once public libraries came to represent the principles of social progress and the production of citizenship, particularly through Carnegie’s endowments, they served as bastions of urban reform. Through this association, the public library gained a long-standing reputation as a silent, civil, and controlled space. At the same time, a key characteristic of the public library was its gradual evolution into a community “third space,” commonly referred to as the neighbourhood “living room” where “the citizen’s presence can be informal and casual.” 1 The Vancouver Carnegie Library’s administrative regulations, its physical characteristics, and general discourse around its construction all indicate that the library was expected to fit within the ideal of a controlled, quiet space intended for individual “uplift.” However, in Vancouver’s waterfront and East End neighbourhoods, where a considerable industrial working class had formed by the first decade of the century and where the library would eventually be constructed, this expectation was not as easily met. Archival evidence instead suggests a much more sensorially rich, vibrant, shared community experience of the library that administrators struggled to reconcile with their expectations about what and who a public library should be for, bringing also into question the extent of control exercised over its users. This apparent ideological and material conflict between upper-class expectations for the library and the way ordinary people used it enriches the complex history of the early twentieth-century library’s transition into a publicly shared commodity.

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