Stroll down one of Alameda’s main drags, and it’s hard to miss the Alameda Museum with its prominent sign on Alameda Avenue just off Park Street.
Crammed with Alameda-sourced artifacts, the downtown museum is a treasure trove for anyone wanting to do research — especially about the city’s many Victorian houses, one of the museum’s more popular services. However, due to a lack of volunteer docents, it’s only open on weekends.
This has been the case since the COVID-19 pandemic, says Valerie Turpen, the museum’s board president who notes that it had previously been open Wednesdays through Sundays. The lack of volunteers also means that programs such as the museum’s lecture series focusing on Alameda history have been put on hiatus.
Another museum staple, the Meyers House and Garden, a nearby restored Victorian that is also only open on weekends (alamedamuseum.org/meyers-house), could also use some extra volunteer help. Turpen blames the shortage of volunteers on the usual reasons such as people getting older and moving away but also says people’s lack of free time is a factor.
Turpen says “people have multiple jobs” due to the current economy and have to ask themselves, “Do I have three hours a week to devote to volunteering?”
Ultimately, she says if just 10 more people would volunteer as little as three hours a month it “would be a dream” and would let the museum, which dates back to 1948, extend its hours and reinstate programs. One of the roadblocks Turpen says she encounters with would-be volunteers is that they think they’re unqualified.
“ ’Oh, I’m not a historian,’ they say. I ask people ‘What’s one of your favorite things about Alameda?’ ”
Turpen says she encourages those who become docents to share their own favorite Alameda stories with museum visitors. Another issue with the museum is perception. Crammed full of furniture and other artifacts dating back to the mid-1800s, at first glance it can look a little more like a retail store than a museum.
Illustrating this point is the big-front-wheel bicycle from circa 1900 in one of the museum’s front window displays. Turpen says she once overheard a passer-by comment, “‘Oh, look at that bicycle. I don’t why it’s here. That should be in a museum.’ ”
“Hello? We are a museum,” says Turpen, who notes having heard other people mistake the museum for an antique store.
Because the museum can seem a bit heavy on Victorian Era displays, Turpen says they’ve reached out to Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and other communities in town to develop displays incorporating their contributions to Alameda.
“We’d love to expand our displays. We want to involve the history of people from everywhere here. There’s so many different cultures that came here throughout time,” says Turpen, who notes that Alameda once had a Chinatown that eventually became a Japantown on Lincoln Avenue near Park Street but that it disappeared during America’s Japanese internment during World War II.
Another reason the museum can have a bit of a thrift store vibe is that it’s charged with accepting items donated from Alamedans. The main criteria is that the artifact has to have some sort of Alameda connection, such as having been originally bought on the Island.
Typically, donated stuff that won’t be shown ends up for sale in the museum’s gift shop, a substantial source of the museum’s income along with the $43,000 stipend that the city of Alameda kicks in annually. Being a docent isn’t just a matter of staffing the store on weekends. For Chuck Millar, a volunteer since 2001, it’s all about contending with the overflow of back room odds and ends that the museum has collected over the years.
“No museum can display everything. Museums have most of their stuff in their archives,” Millar said recently as he prepared a model train exhibit to be updated.
One of the more captivating exhibits at the museum is the one devoted to Alameda’s long-lost Neptune Beach amusement park that stood at the end of Webster Street at Central Avenue from 1917 to 1939 (wp.me/p7ShK5-1xqs). Known as “The Coney Island of the West,” the Neptune Beach exhibit includes a wooden roller coaster car and plenty of photos from the park.
Other museum pieces of note include a gown worn on stage by Alameda’s most famous housewife-turned-comedian, Phyllis Diller; an original tin jar of Jiffy peanut butter, which was invented and produced for many years in a Webster Street factory; and a bicycle manufactured and “built for six” by F.D. Amaral to promote his Alameda Bicycle Shop in 1931.
For more information about becoming an Alameda Museum docent email [email protected]. At 2324 Alameda Ave., admission is free to the museum, which is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and from 1 to 4 p.m. Sundays. For more information on other museum programs, visit alamedamuseum.org online.
Paul Kilduff is a San Francisco-based writer who also draws cartoons. He can be reached at [email protected].
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