The Silver Lake Neighborhood Council History Collective was founded in 2005 by community activist Bea Gold. Its mission is to preserve the oral histories of long-term residents, business owners, artists and other interesting residents of Silver Lake and nearby communities to create an archive of the unique history of the neighborhood for future generations. By the beginning of 2012, the committee had done over fifty video interviews involving more than seventy people. The breadth of the interviews is extraordinary. They include memories from the great-grandchild of a slave, a Japanese-American doctor who was interned at the Santa Anita racetrack during World War II as well as many people who have lived all their lives in Silver Lake.

The Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, California is located northeast of downtown, in an area once known variously as Edendale and Ivanhoe, a beautiful landscape of hills and glens southwest of the Los Angeles River. The region became known more popularly as Silver Lake, after a central reservoir was implemented by City Water Commissioner Herman Silver in 1907. The reservoir itself, designed by William Mulholland, enhanced the area and reflected the aspect of the surrounding hills north of the city's original 28-square-mile land grant, creating a desirable setting for residential construction despite the difficulty of the terrain. There are actually two reservoirs contiguous to each other in the system, the more northern one retaining the former developer's name of Ivanhoe. Many streets (Rowena, Angus, Elsinore, Kenilworth, etc.) have Scottish-inspired names from this period.

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