📌 Bulletin boards of Longfellow

The closure of Milkweed Coffee last month meant, among other disappointments, the loss of perhaps the neighborhood's best bulletin board.

When I stopped by recently, as owner Brenda Ingersoll cleaned out the cafe, the board remained frozen in place. The 9-foot-tall slab of cork was covered with close to 100 colorful papers of all sizes, advertising everything from a drag brunch, to a teenaged dog walker, to a community meeting about stormwater management rules.

Milkweed's board had all the criteria of a good community bulletin board. It was big. It was actively weeded as part of the baristas' weekly chores. It was in a place you naturally lingered, making it possible to leisurely peruse. And, of course, it was well used — Brenda says people stopped in every day to hang flyers on the board, and it was usually easy to identify them, clipboard in hand, making the circuit.

And a good community bulletin board is no small loss. Though it's about as advanced of a communication technology as the town crier or Pony Express, paper-pinned-to-cork has persisted as one of the most efficient ways to let people know about your show, or your cause, or your room for rent. Its usefulness comes from a combination of its simplicity — something you can quickly scan in a few moments during a routine visit — and the natural spam filter of requiring a cause-promoter to go through the effort of actually visiting a physical place. Plus, the kinds of people who read bulletin boards also tend to be the people who might join your choir or find your dog.

With that in mind, here are 10 bulletin boards left around the neighborhood, ranked loosely by their size, visibility, and maintenance. For the sake of purity, the list is limited to physical boards where anyone is free to post. Websites, newsstands, vestibules with some flyers taped on the glass, or curated boards with only in-house flyers were excluded.

(Special thanks to reader Andy Sturdevant for suggesting this very Sturdevant-ian story idea.)

Longfellow Market