Our favorite thing to do was to play Uno.

That was like, the game the play back then, was Uno.

Us girls, we would be sitting over here, chilling, talking crap, watching the guys playing ball, saying who was cute, who was it.

I'm really telling my age now.

It was hip-hop, it was Run-DMC, Doug E. Fresh, Salt-N-Pepa, that's what the thing was.

And we would just be hanging out, and just chilling out here.

I love this premise of Every ZIP Philadelphia, because it's so simple.

It's just like looking at the map broken down into zip codes, and being like, well, what's going on there, and what's going on there?

And I think it's a beautiful premise because it just really forces us to go to all these places in Philadelphia that I don't think usually get covered.

I think we'll do the scenic route.

This strip right here was the beginning of Jewtown, Amber.

[laughs] I don't know how accurate, but I'm just going by what the librarian gave me.

Jewtown.

And I was like, is that like a derogatory term?

Is that what they actually call it?

Is that just what you're calling it right now?

So the copyright of this is 2010, the first exclusively Jewish street in Philadelphia, and came to be called New Jerusalem by Jews, and Jewtown by non-Jews.

In that particular area, we were the only blacks.

As I grew up, I ventured out.

I'm living in Fishtown now, by the way.

I love it.

But if you were black before I was born, my mom said, you couldn't walk through it.

When I got a job, I just never looked back.

Oh, that mirror is horrible.

Hmm?

Mm-hm.

I swear, it doesn't matter how many times you wipe it, you go back and you always see some smudges.

I think it's just this type of mirror.

It's weird.

I never really heard about Jewtown until I met Diane, and we were talking about the different parts of Philly that we grew up in, and just the different sub-neighborhoods of a neighborhood.

The only thing I really knew was a lot of Polish that lived there.

So when I met Diane and I found out that she's obviously black, my first question was, are you Polish, too?

I didn't know it was so rare for us to live in the city.

You never had to lock your doors, you could leave your door open, and it was like a nice, safe environment.

Right.

I just realized how important that little enclave was to her.

And that's my aunt Doreen, and my mom.

Everybody took care of everyone.

This is my girlfriend Margaret, we grew up together.

If I see her, it's just like going back in time.

In the '60s and '70s and '80s within this large Jewish community, there was this small, but really strong African-American community.

And not only was it interesting and really beautiful to hear Diane talk about where she grew up, but then I was also interested in why doesn't exist anymore, why did it go away?

This was a white, working class area.

It was an island of blacks in a sea of whites.

A picture from 1992, Two when we were renovating this place.

We started in 1980 with an after-school program, trying to make a difference in people's lives, in our young people's lives.

The community was like an extended family to all of them.

Now when I look at it, I feel like I should have came back and tried to be more productive in our neighborhood like our parents did.

I was telling him, I feel like-- You're a stranger, so do I. Yeah, I feel like a stranger.

I think it's really easy to walk around Philadelphia and look at blight.

And there's a thing in Philadelphia of, like, people calling blight porn, because there's so many beautiful old buildings that are boarded up or decrepit.

And it's almost like people think that it was always like that.

We did the right thing, what they wanted us to do.

But we didn't come back into the community and stay.

[birds chirping]