" Born and raised," brags Bubbles. "I love Fishtown." Bubbles is working the morning shift at Les & Doreen's, the bar in the heart of the Philadelphia neighborhood. "I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."

"I love my neighbors," says Cheryl while shopping at the Fishtown Market a couple of blocks away. "Everybody helps each other. It's like we're a little family."

Fishtown sits just inside I-95, near the banks of the Delaware River, northeast of the City Center. It's one of dozens of distinctive Philly neighborhoods.

"When I first moved here," says Chris, a grandmother sitting on the front step of the home where she raised her children, "this was like the last completely white enclave in the city."

"It's always been poor to middle class," she explains. "You know, a working-class community."

Fishtown's status as a white, working-class community gives the neighborhood a special place in contemporary sociology and storytelling. In his 2012 book Coming Apart, Charles Murray, my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, uses Fishtown as the proverbial white working-class neighborhood.

Murray's Fictional Fishtown is populated entirely by those working in a "blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation," with "no academic degree more advanced than a high school diploma."

Murray finds that in Fictional Fishtown (that is, in working-class white America as a whole) marriage has fallen, out-of-wedlock births have skyrocketed, idleness has increased, employment has fallen, divorce has skyrocketed, and criminality is way up. Meanwhile upper-middle-class America has seen far slower growth in these problems, and even a reversal of many of them.

Real life Fishtown has fared better. Sure, plenty of old-timers complain about changes, but mostly the complaints are about gentrification.

"Now you can't live here if you're from here," says middle-aged Fishtowner Kevin Lonergan.

"Fishtown used to be Philly's best-kept secret," Bubbles says, "Now we have all the people moving in. I'm not opposed to that, but when I say 'hello, good morning,' don't look at me like I have three heads."

There's constant "back-in-the-day" talk from Old Fishtowners. "Neighbors helped one another, back in my day," one afternoon barmaid says at Les & Doreens. "Today you can't even get a hello out of the newbies. Neighbors were there to help each other. The kids all grew up together."

Like most of Fishtown, the small rowhomes on Chris's street sit right on the sidewalk—no front lawn, no fence, no patio.

"My kids knew all the kids in the neighborhood," she told me, "and their parents. There was a lot of sports teams," she went on. "There was a lot of community strength with that. I don't know that there is so much any more."

Some of the laments are about safety. "Now you gotta watch where you're walkin to," says Jim McElroy, who has lived his whole life in Fishtown.

But Fishtown proper (granted, the debates about the boundaries are epic) is safe and getting safer. It's the adjacent neighborhoods that have gone to hell.

"Kensington," spits Lonergan, "that's the worst. That's the pits…. That's the worst place you could ever live."

"I'll be honest with you," a homeless Fishtown native named Mike Quinn told me from a bench in Fishtown's Palmer Cemetery, "I don't go to the other side of the tracks."

Murray's Coming Apart includes a chapter on "The Real Fishtown," which chronicles real-world decline in all the measures of community health. Census figures, however, don't allows us to track Fishtown proper, and so the decline Murray charts actually is occurring in Kensington—while Fishtown has stayed fairly healthy long enough to go straight from a white working class neighborhood to a hotbed of gentrification.

This story—the strength of Fishtown next to the collapse of Kensington—is probably more revealing, because Kensington and Fishtown used to be the same.

"Kensington, Port Richmond, Fishtown, years ago was all the same," Joe G. tells me at Les and Doreen's. "Blue-collar white. There was more work than you could shake a stick at. The mills and factories went away. If you go down there today you'd better know Spanish."

The factories that laid off Kensingtonians also laid off old Fishtowners. Fishtown's popcorn factory, from which Mike Quinn used to swipe popcorn, shut down. Why did Fishtown do okay while Kensington crumbled?

Drive down the wrong block of Kensington at 11 am and you'll see drug-addled teenagers stumbling through the streets. "Zombies" was the entire response when I asked one girl in nearby Port Richmond about Kensington.

The Crime Map maintained by the Philly Inquirer shows a stark picture. The map includes most of Fishtown within the same area as Kensington, and of the 64 violent crimes in this area between July 1 and August 11, only two have been below York Ave., a standard line of demarcation between the neighborhoods.

Cheryl tells me Fishtown's community strength kept it safe. Of her kids and grandkids, she tells me, "they always seemed to be safe. Everybody knows everybody so my grandchildren's friends' parents used to hang around with my children's friends."

Kate is a senior at Temple University down the road and during the summer she makes sandwiches at Fishtown Market. She went to St. Laurentius, the Catholic school at Fishtown's Polish parish, which is now closed. She plans to "stay around here" after she graduates because of the community's resilience. "Anytime there was any trauma, everyone came together and helped everyone out."

Chris, the grandmother smoking on her front step, tells me how her family stayed together, and even stayed in Fishtown. "My son and daughter-in-law who live up the street work for the city. He works for Fairmont Park. She's a police officer. I worked for the library and my husband was a lieutenant with the prison system. So we had good stable jobs."

Jobs left. The economy changed. New destructive forces came in. Fishtown struggled, and stayed strong. Kensington collapsed into the night of the living dead. Explaining the divergent path would be quite a task—maybe it's because Fishtown was geographically smaller, and didn't get housing projects. Maybe it was just a matter of chance.

But there's another key consideration: in both neighborhoods, the "good old days" stories are at least partly fiction.

Chris, who loves Fishtown and has stayed there, has some darker Fishtown stories to tell.

"There was a house for sale about a block and a half away from here," she says, pointing up Berks Street. "A black family moved in. And the city had the big civil disobedience truck out there for a couple of weeks. And then they moved."

One old Fishtowner tells me the story of her children who fell into drug addiction.

"Drugs did a lot of it," McElroy says.

Everyone from Fishtown talks about the fights they got in. "Growing up in Fishtown," Joe G says at Les & Doreen's, "I had more fights in a day than I did meals." The point of these stories is always that brawlers would grab a beer afterwards. But after you hear these stories enough, and after you hear the odd distinctions the Fishtowners make—"back then you weren't proud to be a druggie," McElroy told me—you can't help but wonder if the good old days were as good as they all say.

J.D. Vance grew up in, and writes of, a very different white working-class area—the hills of Kentucky. When lamenting the collapsed state of his old home, in his new book Hillbilly Elegy, Vance relates his uncles' and other older male relatives' tales of the good old days. But these stories include true horrors: an uncle beating a man unconscious over an insult and running a chainsaw over him; his grandmother almost executing an attempted thief as he lay bleeding on the ground from her first shot.

The folks on the business ends of this chainsaw and this rifle probably never thought it was the good old days. Neither did the black family driven out of Fishtown.

Sitting on a bench on Palmer Cemetery, Mike Quinn was finishing a Natty Ice at about 11 am when he started singing to me about how "it was just the good old days, man." But when Quinn tells the same story everyone else tells—about getting in a fight and then sharing a beer—his story has a different tone. "Back in the day, yeah, you got in fights, and all that, when somebody got in a fist fight, you gave—you say 'I give.'" Quinn started crying at this point. "You don't kick a man while he's down.... I got my a** kicked plenty of times, man. Boom, 'ya got me, I give.'"

Quinn lived with his mom, his best friend, until she died in 2013. Now he's a homeless 50-year-old drinking in a cemetery before noon.

In both Vance's Jackson, Kentucky, and in Fishtown, Pa., there really are some new villains. Mostly it's drugs, especially heroin. These are far bigger problems today than they were "in the good old days."

Mike Quinn, however, knows that sometimes our distinctions among vices aren't as clear as we'd like to believe. Quinn tells me he gets about $195 a month in food stamps. "I know where I can go and sell of them, and get some cash to get some booze."

Quinn holds up his nearly empty Natty Ice can. "I'm an alcoholic," he tells me, "and after I'm done with this here beer, what am I gonna do?" he asks me, rhetorically.

"I'm gonna go to Wawa, and panhandle. So I get another another can of beer."

"Brotherman, Kiddo, Tim," Quinn leans in across the bench and preaches. "Another thing I learned in my life: don't judge, man. I never done heroin. I never smoked crack-cocaine. Back in the day I would look at somebody and be like, there goes a needle-pusher. I'm better than him, because I just do…" and Quinn takes another gulp of his beer, "that."

The weapon of choice "back in the day" was the fist. The drug of choice was the Schmidt beer they serve at Les & Doreens, as early as 7 am (they don't serve coffee). These are surely preferable to the glocks and heroin that run around Kensington today, but Quinn's not so sure about the hierarchy of maladies that puts today's problems as worse than yesterday's.

"I learned: I ain't no better than anyone else."

And maybe the past wasn't no better than any other time. The white working class in real Fishtown and proverbial Fishtown has suffered, measurably, in the past 50 years. But we don't help anything if we sanitize the past.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.