A girl raised by a family of crooks on the Lower East Side decides to go straight, which is harder than the other thing and pays worse. Leroy Scott worked in a settlement house on those streets and wrote what he saw: the fences, the lawyers, the machinery that keeps a person in the trade whether or not they want out. Fifty-eight plates by John Sloan and George Luks, among others, capture the tenement roofs, saloons, and street life of the Lower East Side that Scott knew firsthand.
