It was a wasteland of cheap rooms furnished with cots, filled with penniless immigrants.

Working in the mills and the mines and on the railroads, penniless immigrants and dirt-poor farm boys clambered up to great wealth in one generation.

Who had spent her first married life in one- and two-bedroom apartments that also served as permanent way stations for an endless string of penniless Irish immigrants.

There's no questioning the director's ability to wring moving moments from potentially sentimental and decidedly familiar material: the story of penniless immigrants trying to make it in Manhattan.

"It's famous for its hospitality to friendless, penniless immigrants who wish to become millionaires," I said.

The rich got richer, penniless immigrants flooded in, and the distance between them created urgent questions.

"They were penniless immigrants, and they knew all about discrimination," she said.

The point of debarkation was Adele Street, where many immigrants, penniless, took up residence in simple cottages, providing the beginnings of today's shotgun houses.

The story they flesh out spans decades, beginning with calamity aboard a ship of penniless immigrants from Liverpool in 1894 and ending on a note of hard-won and well-heeled triumph in 1985.

Low rents beckoned to those willing to put up with a floor of a crumbling row house and live check-by-jowl with penniless immigrants and their children.