All 100 branches.
Every single one.

McGregor Park is the second-closest branch to my home, and I walk past it and its park on my walks all the time. The library is only one piece of the block. It sits attached to the McGregor Park Community Centre, with a basketball court, a couple of baseball diamonds, a soccer field, pickleball and tennis courts, a small pool, and kids' play areas wrapped around the two of them. For a family? Jackpot. You can show up in the morning, keep every single person busy until dinner, and when hunger strikes, Toronto's famous 'Shawarma Row' is just down the road. It's always a pleasant place to be.

The original McGregor Park branch opened on February 21, 1960, under the Scarborough Public Library Board, designed by the old Toronto firm Sproatt & Rolph (here's a photo of how it looked before it was demolished). That building came down in 2004 to make way for the current one, designed by ZAS Architects with landscaping by P.F. Kaudewitz, which opened on June 21, 2004, attached directly to the community centre. It picked up an Honourable Mention at the 2005 Toronto Architecture and Urban Design Awards. Then in 2011 came "The Commons", a youth lounge by Bortolotto that links the library and the community centre and gives the whole complex its face along Lawrence Avenue. Thirty youths from the Dorset Park Youth Council worked on it as actual design partners, and the result is a glowing lantern of coloured glass sitting on a solid brick base. How cool is that?

Inside there's a lot of room and a lot of books, and the selection has always been extraordinary. Some days I'll just grab a coffee, pick out a book, read for a while, then step outside and watch the kids on the swings or in the water play area. There's plenty of seating and computers too, though it can get noisy when lots of kids are in having time with their friends. I haven't used the community centre much myself (one day, maybe), but it has generous spaces and I always see people running events there.

As far as I can tell, this is where the Lawrence Avenue East side of Scarborough gathers. If you go, go on a Saturday morning, whole family, no other plans.

I found the Lillian H. Smith branch because of an exhibit called 'Chart a Course', a show of maps pulled from speculative fiction, fictional coastlines, star charts, that sort of thing. The griffins got me before the exhibit did. There are two of them flanking the arched entrance, wings half raised like they are deciding whether to let you in, and they are the calling card of this branch. If you have seen a photo of this building, it almost certainly had the griffins in it. I hadn't even stepped inside and I was already sold on the rest of it too, all delightfully weird postmodern angles.

But, inside? My first thought, and I am not exaggerating, was that I had walked into a giant food silo, one that someone filled floor to ceiling with books instead of grain. The whole interior is a barrel, the atrium goes up and up, and the spiral staircase winds through it so that every level hands you a slightly different view of the place. Honestly, I don't know how people come here to just read or work. I kept stopping mid-step to stare.

So, of course I went home and Googled it. This branch houses the Merril Collection, one of the largest collections of speculative fiction on the planet, more than 80,000 books across science fiction, fantasy, horror, and magical realism. Which explains the griffins, and all the little mythical creatures scattered around the building, they are there on guard duty. And the branch is named for Lillian H. Smith, the first professionally trained children's librarian in the British Empire, hired in 1912, forty years of children's services built on one rule, "the right book, to the right child, at the right time."

If you are ever on College Street, walk in and look up.