In 2016, Melbourne tea and coffee merchant McIvers began selling Ruth Crow tea, a product with a ‘gentle smoked flavour infused with vanilla’. The tea commemorated Ruth Crow as a North Melbournian, as a campaigner with a legacy in ‘just urban planning’ and as a believer in community. This paper argues that Ruth (and her husband Maurie) have become somewhat commodified, if not sanitized, in the 21st century; the McIvers Tea does not, for instance, celebrate the Crows’ half-century of dedication to communism. However, if the Crows (Ruth, in particular) are coming to symbolize certain aspects of inner-city community, the reality is also that they began this process themselves, in the 1970s if not earlier.