The People Work—Evening is Benton Murdoch Spruance's compact view of a weekday evening rush hour. The sidewalks and streets are congested with traffic, and people cram into crowded subways. The composition combines two separate aspects of the daily mass migration of workers heading home into a single image: the above-ground scene of streets and vehicles and the subterranean world of the subway.

Evening is the third in a series of four lithographs in which Spruance depicted the daily cycle of urban dwellers moving amidst crowds of strangers at different times of day. The series provides a glimpse of the routines revolving around work that filled the lives of ordinary American city-dwellers during the 1930s as they struggled against the economic hardships of the Great Depression.