When open, a few neon lights glow in the semi-opaque windows. At 6:30 p.m., Jerry's is far from a happy hour, but the few people inside welcome newcomers. Taras Antonyuk, bellied up to the bar drinking Rolling Rock Green Lights, enjoys the company.

"They're good guys," Antonyuk says of the Jerry's crew. Pressed for evidence, he adds matter-of-factly, "Am I a good guy?"

The interior makes you feel like a guest in owner Jerry Lebid's living room. He's a thick-chested man, happy to dole out a firm handshake and smile. The bar has been in his family for more than three decades and the walls speak to its history. There's ample Philadelphia sports regalia—some of which is yellowed with age, and probably tacked up around the same time Hulk Hogan, flexing on a side door, was in his prime. A map of Ukraine with Cyrillic characters reveals the family origins. From 1970 through the early 1980s, when Jerry's father ran the bar, it was a focal point of the largely Eastern European neighborhood. When I-95 was being built, workers would drop ladders down the side of the overpass to get a meal there.

"They knew good food when they had it," says Lebid. But urban development also had its negative side. "Before 95 cut through the neighborhood, it was solid. Everybody was tight."

The biggest change, of course, is the gentrification of NoLibs, an area once so bad patrons had to knock to get into Jerry's. Nowadays, says Antonyuk, "You can walk down the street and not get robbed."