Everyone here knows that I'm Italian American, so just know that I say this with awe, not as a criticism: The Irish are too thick headed to succumb to White Flight. If you think I'm exaggerating, just take a ride up to Katonah Avenue, near the Yonkers line. The neighborhood looks exactly the same today as it did when I was a kid. Some of the bars from back then are even still in business, and I'm almost 54 years old. It's remarkable (and inspiring) that at least one of the old European immigrant groups has hung on to a neighborhood like that.
That's interesting because it is the exact same situation here in Chicago with a neighborhood called Canaryville.
It is really, really an aberration, with no explanation for its existence except what you mention: Absolute stubbornness. It's on the South Side and is full of 5,000 Irish roughnecks virtually unchanged for a century and a half while most of the neighborhoods around it have changed drmatically.
What a lot of the posters who like to romanticize the mob pretend inner city "Italian" neighborhoods with far less than 10 percent Italians in them still are, Canaryville actually is: A white ethnic neighborhood that has in a sense just been frozen in time.
Very odd, and funny it's the same in NY.
. 