North Philadelphia

In 1949, interracial cooperative living was a radical idea in Philadelphia. The Friends Housing Cooperative transformed this concept into practice. Founded by the Friends Neighborhood Guild and the American Friends Service Committee—both Quaker organizations—to provide low-income collective housing for black and white families years before the organized Civil Rights Movement came to prominence, the Friends Housing Cooperative was a community of people who lived their ideals.

Fair Hill: To Badlands and Back Again the history of a 300-year-old Quaker cemetery in North Philadelphia on Germantown Avenue. Deeded to local residents by Quakerism founder George Fox in the 1700s, the burial ground is the resting place of many of women and men who were active in the Underground Railroad. Philadelphians such as feminist and abolitionist Lucretia Mott and abolitionist Robert Purvis are buried here.

The Uptown Theater occupies center stage in the shining history of North Broad Street in Philadelphia. From 1951 to 1978, in an ornate brick building on Broad between Susquehanna and Dauphin, the Uptown was Philly's vaunted home for the biggest R&B, Soul, and Funk acts of the day. While the building has had other incarnations, from its birth as a grand movie palace in the 1920s to its conversion into a church in the 1980s, it is its heyday as a music entertainment venue that residents most remember.

Marsha Pincus conducts English classes at Simon Gratz High School, a culturally diverse public school in gritty North Philadelphia. Pincus, always on the hunt for more effective ways to teach, is able to engage and motivate students through student-centered teaching using dialogue and playwriting. Her students, thrilled at her overt invitation to bring the whole range of their lives and cultures into the classroom, explain how the classes have helped them become more articulate, persuasive, and deeply interested in both playwriting and playing with words.