The Neighborhood That Outlived Its Obituary
In Fishtown these days, you can eat a top-rated meal inside a former factory. The building that once turned out textiles or machine parts now turns out tasting menus. More than a dozen coffee shops dot a map that, not so long ago, charted mostly vacancy and loss. The bones of the old industrial economy are still standing, but something new is living in them.
That would be a pleasant enough story about any neighborhood. About Fishtown, it is something more. Because Fishtown was not supposed to have a future. It had been assigned a different role in the American story: the cautionary tale.
In 2012, Charles Murray published Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, and the old riverside Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown, working class since before the Revolution, became a national byword. Murray used it as his emblem of everything unraveling in blue-collar America: marriage rates cut in half, men drifting out of the labor force, pews emptying, crime climbing. “Fishtown” ceased to be a place and became a data set, shorthand for decline itself.
Statistics have their uses. They can reveal what anecdote conceals. But a statistic is a snapshot, and neighborhoods do not hold still for the camera. While Fishtown was serving as the nation’s favorite symbol of working-class collapse, actual Fishtowners went on living, working, building, and, as it turns out, reviving.
On this week’s episode of Acton Line, I talk with my colleague Noah Gould, who traveled to Fishtown and reported what he found for The Wall Street Journal. The short version: the poster child of decline is booming.
Noah is no romantic about this. Gentrification carries real costs, and the longtime residents he spoke with feel them: rising rents, familiar faces departing, and the strangeness of watching your corner bar become a cocktail lounge. He does not gloss over any of it. But the story Fishtowners themselves tell is not primarily one of displacement. It is, in their own telling, a feel-good story: a community hammered by decades of economic shifts that is enjoying a genuine comeback.
It is easy, from a distance, to sort every changing neighborhood into one of two prefabricated narratives: decline or displacement, ruin or ruination-by-renewal. Noah went and listened.
What strikes me most about Fishtown’s turnaround: no one decreed it. There was no federal renewal program with the neighborhood’s name on it, no master plan drawn up in a distant office. What happened instead was the patient, unglamorous work of civil society. Entrepreneurs taking risks on an old factory floor, newcomers and longtime residents negotiating a common life, with institutions rebuilt block by block and storefront by storefront.
This is the kind of renewal that declinist narratives, left and right, have trouble seeing. We are awash in obituaries for working-class America, and the grief behind them is often sincere. Real things were lost in Fishtown, and Murray was not wrong to count them. But the ledger of communities is never closed. Where renewal comes, it tends to look less like policy and more like neighborliness. It rarely makes the news. Noah’s reporting is a welcome exception.
Fishtown entered the national imagination as a statistic. It deserves to be known again as a neighborhood. A particular place where particular people are doing the ancient human work of making a home together, in buildings their great-grandparents would recognize even if the menus would baffle them.
The factories are still there. They are just full of life again.
Watch my full conversation with Noah Gould on YouTube: