In Maggie: a Girl of the Streets, by Stephen Crane, the disheartening images of Riis's photographs are realistically depicted through the story of young family struggling through life in Rum Alley. There, life is a picture of deterioration, passivity and despair. "From a window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignornant stables, there leaned a curious woman. Some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for …showed first 75 words of 389 total…

…showed last 75 words of 389 total…where, as God says, the little hills sing together in the morning. Under the trees of her dream gardens there had always walked a lover." (Crane, 19) As the "lover," Pete represents the bright future Maggie has imagined. She placed trust in this sensalionized idea of a Romeo of who will sweep her off her feet and save her from these depths of despair, an idea stemming from her eminent trust in the spectacles of society.