Aside from being typically leftist in its orientation, the song pissed off people from Allentown because, as they said, “we don’t just lay around in our beds waiting for work...”
Typically leftist by calling the ‘union people’ snakes that crawled away?
As for the people of Allentown, they eventually gave him the Key to the City as a reward:
From Wiki:
Reaction to song in Allentown
Allentown, Pennsylvania, for which the song is named, 2010
The song was met with mixed responses in Allentown. Some criticized the song as degrading and full of working-class archetypes.[4] But when Joel returned to the area following the album’s release and the song became a hit record, he was awarded the key to the city by Allentown’s mayor, who praised it as “a gritty song about a gritty city.”
Before a sold-out crowd at Stabler Arena in neighboring Bethlehem, People magazine reported that Joel was greeted enthusiastically with a five-minute standing ovation as he closed his third encore with “Allentown.” At the end of the song and extended ovation, Joel was greeted with even more sustained applause when, in an apparent defense of the song’s meaning, he pointedly told the Allentown crowd, as is his wont at the end of every one of his concerts: “Don’t take any shit from anybody.”[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allentown_%28song%29