[Albion Wilde]

Philly remains a patchwork of ethnic enclaves. There is some race mixing, but as income declines, vigilante border control of the turfs is de facto. By that I mean that people who violate the unspoken ethnic character of a block or neighborhood will suffer retaliations. It's not that you can't move to a neighborhood if you are not of the same ethnicity; it's that you are the one who must make the effort to fit in and understand the norms. Otherwise, you will have your property vandalized and will have threats made by the local power brokers, the ward leaders, the local businesses who won't speak to you or sell to you, et cetera, or the punk kids who don't mind messing with you to keep you in line. So you don't mess with the prevailing norms in working class Philly neighborhoods.

That said, when the City maintains a big public park anywhere nearby, or builds a big schoolhouse with a basketball court outside, everyone expects and tolerates black kids coming to play basketball. Locals might even enjoy seeing their sportsmanship, and don't think much about how many blocks away they might have come from. For instance, the Bella Vista playground smack in the middle of South Philly's Italian Market section is only four blocks from one set of projects and eight blocks from another, but that's not far for youths on bicycles wanting to play basketball in a park where there are night floodlights. So their presence becomes tolerated. Until something happens.

[kearnyirish2]

Here in NJ such mixing is rare; when the cities fell, they fell completely. In some cases barriers like railroads, highways, or bodies of water preserved stretches (much easier to protect, but otherwise all non-blacks (as well as many working blacks) fled.

Those that saw any return of wealth only did so when an area was purged (sections of Jersey City, for instance); nobody was going to sink a dime into areas that could be overrun by disgruntled unassimilated minorities seeking reparations. Asbury Park’s revival stopped almost before it started when the wealthy that had been scheduled to move in realized such a purge would not occur; they weren’t wanted to replace the gibsmedats, but rather to fund them (while they remained just blocks away).