When the father arrived home to his squalid, Lower East Side tenement building, he was exhausted. He paused at the door to pose for a Jacob Riis photo, and then trudged though the entryway. The grit of coal from the furnace in the oil refinery still covered his face. This, despite the fact that we worked on the docks hauling fish. His apartment was in the rear of the building: a cramped, filthy space overlooking a pile of rubbish that the realtor had described as a “quaint fixer-upper with a partial city view.” He approached the door, removed a rat from the doorknob, and entered the chaos.

He came in through the kitchen where his wife was sweating over a pot of fish head stew, an old family recipe that was despised by generations. The father silently removed his stovepipe hat and hung it over the stove-pipe. He was greeted by one of his children. The name escaped him.

"Hey, mister!" the urchin howled. "Get a load of dis kettle of fish!" The boy spun a tale of brawling in the streets as the father did an early version of the crossword puzzle, which featured one word.