Skip to main content
Alder Commons

Archives

Fifty years of the neighborhood remembering itself

Fifty years of the neighborhood remembering itself: photos, newsletters, minutes, and the occasional mystery stockpot.

Photo archive

3,400 photos

From 1974 slide film to last month’s potluck. The digitization crew adds more every winter.

The Riverbend Reader

418 issues

Every newsletter since the first mimeographed sheet. Searchable from 1998 onward.

Meeting minutes

1974 – present

Every board and annual meeting. The institutional memory that outlives any one of us.

Oral histories

31 recordings

Founding members and long-timers on tape, including all three versions of the bus line story.

A few frames from the boxes

Long dinner tables set up outdoors for a community potluck
Summer potluck on the green
Hands repairing a small household appliance at a workbench
Repair café, Saturday morning
Paper lanterns glowing at a nighttime neighborhood gathering
Lantern walk, October
Trays of seedlings and seed packets on a wooden table
Seed swap at the Hall

The digitization crew wants you

Every winter the archive committee scans another era out of the basement. It’s quiet work with good company and better gossip — fifty-year-old gossip, the safest kind.