In the early 1990s, Jonathan Demi directed the film Philadelphia about the AIDS epidemic

at the 80s and early 90s. Needing a rock song to open the movie, he approached Bruce Springsteen.

The boss had previously written unfinished song about a friend who had died and he went to his

home studio and with just a drum machine and no musicians, he quickly crafted a demo.

Thinking the song's rock beat didn't mesh well with its plane of lyrics,

Springsteen nonetheless said to Demi who loved it and the song would go on to win an academy

award and become an anthem for those who had lost their lives or their friends to AIDS.

And the music video for this song works just as well as the opening of the movie.

With Springsteen serving as our churrigae as he takes us around center city, independence

national historical park, northern liberties, self-filly, the barrio, written how square,

and finally the Camden Riverfront. When Springsteen sings about being bruised and battered and

unrecognizable, he's talking about someone ravaged by HIV AIDS, but he could just as easily

be talking about the city of brotherly love. By the early 90s, William Penn's dream of creating a

city that would not bring the horrors of European urban life to the shores of the new world had turned

into a nightmare. It was a nightmare that disproportionately impacted one population,

African American men. In an influential 2015 piece for the New York Times,

researchers wrote about the 1.5 million missing black men, including 36,000 in Philadelphia,

or 42.8% of that population. These are men who either died or were incarcerated,

somewhere the victims of HIV AIDS, somewhere the victims of drugs or the war on drugs,

others were gang members or the victims of gang violence, and then there were those who were

wrongfully convicted. In the turns Lewis studies, we took you down San Sonsam Street, one of the streets

of Philadelphia or in his case West Philadelphia. Now we're taking you back east and at same street

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