I was overwhelmed by the whirlwind of activity inside the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
The bellhops had been replaced by National Guard soldiers in military fatigues. Instead of a concierge, there were workers conducting health screenings. The splendid chandelier was still there, but gone were the tourists.
They had been supplanted by migrants from Venezuela and Guinea and Haiti, most of whom had recently crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. It was last February, and I had been writing for months about the steep influx of asylum seekers in New York City, and the city’s struggle to house them. But this was my first time inside the Roosevelt, the unlikely welcoming center for migrants seeking free shelter in the city.
The century-old lobby had become the epicenter of the emergency. And this was Day 1 of what would become an eight-month project to document life inside the country’s largest shelter system for migrants.
Migrant shelters have become common across the city. They are hotels in Times Square. Converted office buildings in Queens. Even tents on a Brooklyn airfield. “Migrant shelter” was not even a common term in New York two years ago. Yet the facilities quickly became lightning rods in a debate over how openly the city, and the nation, should welcome immigrants.
But most of us — reporters, New Yorkers, Times readers — had never gotten a good look inside. To scrutinize the oft-criticized living conditions. To see how migrants were settling into a new city. To document a defining and fleeting moment in the city’s history.
That changed when the photographer Todd Heisler and I gained long-term access to the shelter system this year.
Our objectives, which we explained to city officials, were to bring readers into these intimate spaces and to capture the rhythms of daily life inside them. We also wanted to understand the challenges of temporarily housing more than 225,000 new people in New York, and to tell the stories of the displaced people living in shelters.
Todd and I set out to find roughly 10 migrants who represented the diversity of the migrant population (age, country of origin, family composition), lived in a variety of shelters (hotels, warehouses, tent dormitories) and had a range of experiences.
It was a time-consuming balancing act — vetting potential subjects, gaining their trust, working with translators, coordinating shelter visits — that began with our first trip to the Roosevelt Hotel in February.
That’s where we met a family of four from Colombia who had arrived in New York that day. Todd and I shadowed them for months as they found their bearings in an unfamiliar city. We repeated that approach with other newcomers, relying on a time-tested reporting tactic: small talk.
We struck up a conversation in Spanish with an Ecuadorean mother waiting for a bus outside a giant tent shelter in Brooklyn. Once inside, we approached a Chinese family who welcomed us into their small cubicle. I interviewed them using a mobile translation app.
Adam Shrier, a spokesman for Health and Hospitals Corp., the city agency that runs many of the shelters, connected us to some of our subjects. But we met most of the people we profiled by spending time outside the shelters. That’s how we met a Senegalese man living in a Queens office building, and a Venezuelan construction worker staying in a shelter by the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Todd and I noticed patterns the more time we spent inside the shelters. The ingenious way that migrants kept their belongings tidy and safe in crowded quarters. The WhatsApp groups migrants created to share information. The recurring gripes with the quality of the food and the general distrust of staff members at the shelters.
We also spent time with families as they navigated the city. We hung out with the Colombian family for days, not just at the Midtown hotels where they were living, but as they picked up their children from school and sold peanuts on the subway. We were there when the parents were married near City Hall.
Todd flew in a helicopter to photograph the shelters from above, capturing the tent sites against the city skyline to help readers visualize the sprawling scale of the system.
I, unfortunately, missed the helicopter ride. But I will never forget my visit to a giant tent complex that the city erected on soccer fields on Randall’s Island. The shelter’s reputation, like New Yorkers’ perception of the migrant crisis, had been informed by the scenes of disorder outside its fences: flashes of violence, open-air vending and homeless encampments.
But inside, it was hard to ignore the magnitude of the migration.
Men from Latin America rested in rows of military-style cots, scrolling on their phones or chatting with neighbors, while men from Africa knelt to pray during Ramadan.
It was a serene scene. The fates of hundreds of men had collided, however briefly, inside a tent dormitory thousands of miles from their homelands, and they were stranded in one of the richest cities in the world — out of view from almost everyone.
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