I suppose we all find reason to quibble when the national news comes to town and tries to make sense of the place. I just learned that the rest of the state, including Pittsburgh, is very blue collar, but Philadelphia is not.
The city of Philadelphia is a very blue collar place. Sure we have the usual chunk of lawyers, health professionals, academics, and other higher end middle class professionals. But they're concentrated in a relatively small part of the city, mostly, though not exclusively, in Center City and University City. The rest of the city - areas containing the other 80%+ of the population or so - is highly blue collar. And I don't just mean in the "what kind of job they do" sense, I mean in basic class sensibility and culture.
The suburbs, which in some ways dominate the area, are a different story of course.
