April 1943. Illinois Central R.R. freight cars at the South Water Street freight terminal, Chicago. The C & O and Nickel Plate Railroads lease part of this terminal. View full size. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano.

Tenement homeworker with clothing tags. Roxbury, Massachusetts. August 1912. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine. View full size. Homeworkers, often children, sewed tags onto finished garments or performed other piecework at home instead of going to school.

October 1908. "Boy Sweeper and Carding Machines, Lincoln Cotton Mills, Evansville, Indiana." Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine. View full size.

"Bring out yer rats." Ferrets were used in turn of the century New York to track down rodents. Here is the result of one such hunt in 1908. You want to be dressed in a jacket and tie for this kind of work. From the George Grantham Bain Collection. View full size.

Secondhand plumbing store, Brockton, Mass. December 1940. Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano. View full size. As of 2007, Saba Mechanical Plumbing & Heating is still in business in Brockton, at an address on Linus Avenue.

Street corner, Brockton, Massachusetts. January 1941. Two blurry figures pass by a fire hydrant in this time exposure by Jack Delano. View full size. Using the 125 above the door and the street sign as clues, we were able to find this building in Google Maps: 125 Pleasant Street at North Warren Avenue. It's the building to the right with the white roof, and seems to be more or less unchanged. Some of the apartments above the store are on the market as condos. The building the photographer used as his vantage point has disappeared, replaced by a parking lot.

Children in the tenement district, Brockton, Massachusetts. December 1940. 4x5 Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano. View full size. These houses, which look to have been built in the 1890s, must have been imposing in their day. Note the elaborate woodwork and intricate system of gutters and downspouts.