Fresh Air - The Migrant Crisis In NYC

Episode Date: February 15, 2024

How is New York City coping with the 175,000 migrants from the Southern border? New York Times reporter Andy Newman says the city's legal mandate to provide shelter to any who need it is being tested by a stream of migrants — some of whom were sent on buses by Southern governors.Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Dave Davies. While much attention has been focused on the surge of migrant crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border and battles in Congress over immigration policy, a crisis driven by the influx of new arrivals has been building 2,000 miles away in New York City. More than 175,000 migrants have made their way to New York, which has long had a policy of providing shelter to anyone in the city who is without housing. Many of those trekking to New York came on buses provided by Southern governors, most notably Greg Abbott of Texas. Many others have come on their own to connect with family and find work. The cost of providing shelter and other assistance to arriving migrants in New York is now in the billions of dollars.

Other cities, notably Chicago and Denver, are facing similar challenges, but the crisis is particularly acute in New York. Mayor Eric Adams has said, quote, this issue will destroy New York City. Our guest, New York Times reporter Andy Newman, has been reporting on the crisis in all its dimensions. The city's efforts to house migrants, including building tent cities, and steps it's taken to reduce the number of migrants it must care for, including discouraging people from coming to New York, busing some to other counties in New York State, and critics say deliberately making conditions so difficult for migrants that they choose to leave the city's shelter system. Andy Newman has reported on New York City and the surrounding region since the mid-90s, with a particular focus in recent years on homelessness, poverty, and social services.

Andy Newman, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you, Dave. You know, the scale of this issue is just striking. I cover Philadelphia, where the entire municipal budget is about $6 billion. In New York, more than $2 billion spent already just on caring for these arriving migrants. $175,000, as I mentioned in the intro, and growing. Do we know how many of these migrants headed in from the southern borders on buses sent by elected officials there? We don't actually.

The short answer to that question is that people associate the migrant influx into New York with the buses sent by Governor Greg Abbott of Texas. But those buses only make up a pretty small percentage, maybe 20,000 out of the 175,000 people. A lot of people are coming on their own. And, you know, New York City has had this policy for many years of providing shelter to anyone who needs it. As I understand that, that is by court decision, not a law, right? Correct. That stems from a court case in the 70s and 80s. Do city officials think that that got free shelter indefinitely. They would spread word on social media, which is a very, very powerful driver of this entire global migration phenomenon. And people told their friends, come to New York. You can have a place to stay while you get your life together. Right. So the city, since it had this obligation to provide shelter for so many,

has a shelter system with an intake center and screening and many, many different shelters that unhoused people would go to. How well equipped was this system to handle these migrants? It was just not equipped to handle the numbers of people. The homeless system in New York is a little bit bumpy even in the best of times. When Mayor Eric Adams took office, there were about 50,000 people or a little more in shelters in New York. And now there are over 120,000 people. So what we've seen over the course of the last couple of years is more than a doubling of the size of the homeless shelter system. And normally opening up new homeless shelters in New York

is a process that takes months. And for, you know, about the last year and a half, New York has been basically having to open up the equivalent of one new shelter every single day. And it's just been a phenomenal scramble for the city to try to do that. And they have sometimes fallen behind. Right. And of those roughly 120,000 people in the system, roughly half are migrants from the southern border? Yeah, a little more than half, 65,000 right now. Wow. Now, I guess the other difference is that citizens of the United States who are without shelter have certain needs. Migrants have different needs, right? And the system wasn't really designed to deal with those. I mean,

you know, like applying for asylum, for example. When the migrants started coming in large numbers, people urged the city to help everybody apply for asylum. Another difference between migrants and non-migrants is that people who are U.S. citizens are eligible for all kinds of housing vouchers and other public assistance that can help them get out of shelters. With the migrants, most of them were not eligible for much of anything. And so therefore, it falls squarely on the city to house them in these shelters. Right. And if they are seeking asylum, as I understand it, they can't legally work until at least 180 days after they have actually filed a petition for asylum, right? So that's six months. extended this thing called temporary protected status for Venezuelans back in September. And that immediately allowed approximately 15,000 people in shelters to apply for and to be able to get work authorization within a month or two months. But, you know, all of the migrants who

come to New York City say that they want to work. Everybody you talk to says, all I want to immigrants always have, get off-the-books jobs. A lot of them are doing delivery. People work in restaurants. People do construction. But if people were able to get legal jobs, they would have a path out of shelter much more quickly. And that has been a particular frustration for Mayor Adams and officials in New York, because they don't have the ability to snap their fingers and give everybody work authorization. They need Washington to take action. And Washington has been notably paralyzed on this for a couple of years now. Right. And the city, ideally, it would be able to help

individual migrants apply for asylum if they haven't. In May of, ideally, it would be able to help individual migrants apply for asylum if they haven't. In May of, I think, last year, you wrote that a reporter had asked a deputy mayor how many of the roughly 72,000 migrants then had applied for asylum. Do you remember the response here? Yeah, she said something like very, very few. And then Deputy Mayor Ann Williams-Isom was asked why so few. And she said basically, I guess they just don't really know how to get the paperwork done or what the procedures are. And that struck a lot of people as a very strange thing to say because at that point, for eight or nine months, people had been begging the city to help people apply for asylum, which is normally, you know, that is not normally the city's job. And the city, once it did set up an asylum application help center, talked about how

this was a new thing, something that no one had really ever put together before at the municipal level. And that's true. But people also were criticizing the city for being very slow to get going on that. Right. It was a whole not job, in addition to having to just find housing for so many people. This sort of really developed in the spring, I guess, of 2022. And as the numbers grew and the system became overwhelmed, what were some of the conditions that you and other reporters observed in intake centers and shelters? What did you see migrants going through? So in July of 2022, this is about three months into the influx of migrants, there was a main intake center for families seeking shelter in

the Bronx. And it just became so crowded that people were sleeping on the floor there, which is against this court decree that the city must house everybody who needs housing every night. And so you had basically the first instance of the system breaking down. So people were sleeping in the office? People were sleeping on the floor. This was only for a couple of nights and it wasn't an enormous number of people, but it was enough for the city and critics of the city and the advocates for homeless people who pushed the city to honor its commitment to notice and to speak up and to kind of take the city to task for just being caught off guard and not opening enough shelters in time to not get blindsided by that. Right. An alarm which suggested a serious response is needed. You know, you're right that in the fall of 2022, as this was unfolding and the city shelters were bursting at their limits, that the

mayor brought people from other city departments in apart from the homeless shelter providers and brainstormed about, you know, what can we do here to quickly provide more shelter? What kind of ideas did they come up with? So one of the big early ideas was to basically build these tent cities, not individual tents, but just like picture a gigantic parking lot with like a huge catering tent that has enough room to put about a thousand or two thousand beds in it. It was about to open one on a parking lot on a beach in the Bronx, and that one flooded after only an inch of rain. So the city scrapped that idea. There were some city officials

that thought maybe we could put people on cruise ships because the cruise industry in New York hasn't really come back yet from the pandemic. And here's, you know, here's space and an opportunity. Mayor Adams has been saying since the beginning, everything is on the table. We will put people anywhere we can find them, whether it's in closed schools, you know, tent cities and parking lots and hospitals. The city has had to rent a lot of hotels, which is very, very expensive. You know, shelters that were used and then not used have been reopened. The city has been basically kind of turning over every stone trying to find places to put people. We were talking about how the city struggled to find options to house people, far more people than its shelter system was set up to accommodate.

One of the things that was settled upon were tent cities where you have a big open space, and I think you described it as a huge catering tent. I mean, you could have hundreds of people, including families in these. What was life there like? Did they have any privacy? Did they have access to, you know, bathrooms and showers? tent city for families towards the end of 2023. And normally, families in the shelter system are entitled to their own room with some kind of kitchen facility and a bathroom. That rule has basically been suspended. And so in the family tent city, which is at a former airfield way on the edge of Brooklyn, a place that is so kind of far from the population centers of the city that it's actually been used as a kind of urban getaway campground. So it's now home to, I believe, 500 families. And there are sort of dividers. Basically, each family gets

a cubicle. And so there are little dividers, but there's no, it's not like having, you know, your own room with real privacy. You have to leave, obviously, your cubicle if you want to use the bathroom, if you want to take a shower, if you want access to laundry. In these tent cities for single adults, it's a different setup. Picture rows and rows and rows of cots, like in the children's book, Madeline, where she lives in an orphanage and it's just rows and rows of beds. People, you know, there's a normal rule in the shelter system that for single adults who sometimes housed in these big congregate rooms where there are 20 people sleeping in a room, you at least get a little bit of personal space. There's like six feet between

you and the next bed. In these tent cities, the cots are basically right up against each other. So they're not very comfortable places, but they're not designed to be very comfortable places. They're designed to be temporary shelter that people want to get out of as soon as possible. And that's what the city is hoping to do. Yeah. And since some are at remote locations, that makes it hard because your kids have to get to school. If you're a family, you'll want to apply for benefits or look for employment, not easy to get anywhere. What kind of stories did you hear from migrants who were in these places? One thing that's become much more difficult for the migrants in shelters in the city over the last six months is that the city has phased in these limits

on how long you can stay in a shelter. You are technically entitled to stay in city shelters for as long as you need to, but they made a rule that every 30 days, if you're a single adult, or every 60 days, if you're a family, you have to pack up all your stuff, leave that shelter, go to the intake center, reapply, and then get assigned to a new shelter. And this city is very, very forthcoming about doing this specifically to pressure people to leave the shelter system, or as the city calls it, take the next step. So this has caused a lot of kind of displacement and inconvenience and a lot of confusion because people are being told different things by different people at these shelters. For the families, when that 60-day rule went into effect last month, a lot of people were very upset about that because what happens is you get your kid enrolled in school and then suddenly you have to move out of where you're living and you may be placed in a new shelter that's nowhere near your kid's school. And it's already been kind of a very difficult thing.

You know, you have thousands and thousands of kids who speak no English entering the school system, which is there is room in the school system in New York because the city lost a lot of population during the pandemic. But the city has not been quite set up to help all these kids who some of them have, you know, journeyed thousands and thousands of miles through very difficult, treacherous conditions in the Darien Gap and arrived here kind of traumatized. It's a very difficult place to be right now to come to New York. And it's already difficult for the families who live in shelters. And so these 60-day limits that force people to relocate every 60 days, a lot of families and a lot of advocates for migrants are very upset about them. So what this means then, if you're in your family in one of these shelters or in one of the 10 cities, you have to pack up everything you have, carry it to an intake center. I guess there's the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan is one.

That is the main one for families. Right. And then you're getting in line with other people who have expired their limits and new arrivals who are all there. What if they can't get to you in a day or two? The city has kind of made it a priority to find a place for families. So generally right now, families who do want to stay in the shelter system are assigned a new shelter usually the same day. For single adults, where the city is really kind of pushing to encourage those folks to leave shelter as soon as possible. And it's kind of the city is less concerned about the sort of public relations aspect of single adults going through hardship. What we have now is single adults who hit the 30-day limit not immediately getting a bed. They get sent to a waiting center where they can sleep on the floor, which is really technically a violation of the city shelter rule. But there are people who are sleeping outside even in the winter because they want to be first in line to get the beds that open up that day. So right now for men, it's predominantly single men, some single

women also. Those are the folks who are kind of really feeling the impact of the city's shelter limits. And there are people who have been sleeping either outside or on floors for days and days, sometimes over a week. And it's remarkable. You say the city is explicit about this, saying, yes, we want to encourage people to leave the system. And these challenges are part of that? The city has been using kind of a carrot and stick approach. It has been kind of counseling people, trying to help them find housing, trying to help them connect to family that they can live with, trying to connect them to all kinds of services to make it easier for them to move out and pay rent somewhere.

The stick is just making it as basically as unpleasant and inconvenient as they can get away with to try to coax people out of the shelters. And for the single adults, this process has been very effective for the city. The city says that about 80% of the single adults who hit that 30-day limit and have to reapply if they want to stay in the shelters don't reapply. Some of them leave the city. Some of them leave the country and go back home. The city is also buying tickets for people. At one point, it was buying plane tickets all the way back to South America if people were willing to take those simply because it's much less expensive to buy somebody a flight that costs $500 or $1,000 than it is to house them for weeks or months at a time.

We're going to take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Andy Newman. He's a reporter for The New York Times covering the city and the region with a focus on homelessness, poverty, and social services. For much of the past two years, he's been writing about the impact of migrants streaming into the city from the U.S.-Mexico border. He'll be back to talk more after this short break. I'm Dave Davies, and this is Fresh Air. Hey, it's Seth. And I'm Molly.

We're producers at Fresh Air, and together we write the newsletter. It's a behind-the-scenes look at the show. We highlight interviews from the week, recommend things that we're reading, watching, and listening to, and give you an exclusive look at the interviews that are coming up. My dad raves. I love reading every week, even when I don't know what you're talking about. Subscribe for yourself at whyy.org slash fresh air. We're speaking with New York Times reporter Andy Newman, who's been covering New York City's efforts to cope with the arrival of more than 175,000 migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border. Many came on buses provided by Southern governors, including Greg Abbott of Texas,

but many came on their own. The city has a long-standing policy of providing shelter to anyone without housing. It's already spent more than $2 billion on the new arrivals and has been unable to keep up with the demand, even after building tent cities, to house some. Mayor Eric Adams has said the crisis could destroy New York City and is seeking help from federal and state officials. For migrants who leave the shelter system but try to stay in New York, I mean, it's not a place with a lot of affordable rental housing. What do they do? What becomes of them? It's a very good question because the city doesn't really track what happens to people after they leave the shelter system.

But, I mean, I think when people leave the shelter system, they do what immigrants have always done in New York. They double up with friends, with family members. In some communities, there are places where you can rent a bed for like $30 a night in someone's apartment. A lot of people are leaving New York now that they're finding out how hard it is to get housing here. A lot of people are leaving New York, though we don't really have numbers on that. The city and the state have an effort to move people out of New York City into other parts of the state where housing is a little bit cheaper, and the state is paying the rent for folks for the first year. Because even in other parts of the state, rents are pretty high right now. They've only been able to house about 100 people. But the city is just desperate to find places for everybody to move to. Many have criticized Greg Abbott and some other Southern elected officials from busing people to northern cities. In mid-2023, New York City kind of began

doing the same thing, didn't it? Busing some migrants to other counties outside the city? Yeah. So as part of the city's efforts to find places for all these people where there simply was no room inside New York City and its shelters. Mayor Adams was making arrangements with hotels and other places in upstate New York, places outside the city. He was not always particularly coordinating with the local officials in those other parts of the state. Most of New York State outside New York City is Republican territory. So there was a lot of pushback. There were a lot of Republican local officials all over New York State who issued executive orders saying, no, you cannot house your homeless people in our county, Mayor Adams. So this was a situation that probably called for a good bit of diplomacy. And Mayor Adams does not always play well with others, does not always communicate particularly effectively. And so he often found himself kind of butting heads with local officials outside of

New York City when he wanted to send migrants to those places. The mayor wanted help from Governor Kathy Hochul. Were they able to collaborate? Did he get what he was looking for from her? In Governor Hochul's new budget, which she released a few weeks ago, there is, I believe, $2.4 billion for New York City to help take care of its migrants. And Mayor Adams said that that's great, but it is nowhere near enough. The mayor has said that this fiscal year, the one that ends in July, the city is going to be spending more than $4 billion. That number is expected to increase the following fiscal year. So the mayor kind of splits his efforts between begging the paralysis in Congress that has made it very hard

for Washington to issue a lot of aid to cities to help them with migrants. So Mayor Adams has made at least 10 trips to Washington to kind of bang the drum to try to get more money, and he does not have very much to show for it. Yeah. You know, Mayor Adams also last fall took a four-day trip to Mexico, Ecuador, and Colombia, I guess, to discourage migrants from coming to New York. What did he do? How did he go? Were you on the trip yourself? I was on this trip. And this was probably the most surreal moment of this whole crisis. We had the sight of the mayor of New York City traveling thousands of miles to the spot in Columbia where people set out for the Darien Gap, which is the main kind of human smuggling route through Central America, arriving by helicopter with this big entourage. And he comes to spread the message to the migrants that they should not come to New York because there's no room. And it seemed like a kind of a tone deaf mission because you have people who are fleeing unbelievable poverty, political instability, government dysfunction,

like people who are so desperate that they are willing to trek thousands of miles through the jungle on foot, facing all kinds of dangers, whether it's natural disaster or, you know, robbers and criminals and rapists who prey on the migrants. People who are really, really at the end of their rope as human beings, desperate for a place to go. And many of them want to come to New York, which has been a magnet for immigrants, you know, forever. And some of the migrants that we spoke to in Columbia when the mayor came to visit were saying things like, wow, New York must really have some great stuff if the mayor is willing to come thousands of miles all the way here to talk to us

to try to protect the resources of his city. It was a message that was, I thought, doomed to fail. And sure enough, it has had no effect on the migrant influx into New York City. Yeah. I often find that chief executives greatly exaggerate the power of their own words on others. It also seemed that at times on this trip, he was kind of giving a different message that, you know, immigration is wonderful and it, you know, pollinates the culture of the city. The cross-pollination. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, the mayor has been dealt a very difficult hand. This challenge would be an enormous challenge for any mayor. The mayor started when the migrants were first arriving and it was not at the level of crisis that it is right now. was very kind of Statue of Liberty in his rhetoric and talked about how we open our arms and, you

know, we welcome all these people that are going to help make the city even better. By October 2023, when he went to South America, he was sort of splitting his messaging between going and actually like going to shelters in South America and trying to meet migrants and hear their stories of woe and difficulty. And at the same time, spreading this message that you should not come to New York because there's no room. It was a very kind of conflicting and contradictory messaging adventure and, like I said, one that did not have a particular effect on the migrants coming to New York. Let's take another break here. Let me reintroduce you. We are speaking with Andy Newman.

He is a reporter for The New York Times covering the city with a focus on homelessness, poverty, and social services. He's been reporting for the past two years on the impact of migrants streaming into the city from the nation's southern border. We'll continue our conversation in just a moment. This is Fresh Air. 175,000 migrants that have come to New York since over the past, what, nearly two years is a lot. It's a big city. Are these migrants a visible presence in New York on subways, streets, nearly two years is a lot. It's a big city. Are these migrants a visible presence in New York on subways, streets, parks? They are now. I think at the beginning of the crisis, it was

something that you read about in the paper and didn't see very much of. But as more and more people, as the number of migrants currently in shelters passed 60,000, you do see it's become a very common site in the subway system, which of course is used by millions of people every day, to see families, sometimes with little kids, selling candy, selling mangoes, selling other kinds of food and other treats on the subways. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of attention paid and a lot of coverage of migrants as a sort of menace and some coverage of crimes committed by migrants or allegedly committed by migrants. And there's been kind of a backlash against the migrants in recent months in New York. Part of that is I think people are just kind of exhausted with the fact that taking care of the migrants is so expensive to the city. And the mayor at one point was threatening to cut other services in order to kind of keep housing the migrants. The shelters where the migrants live, as more and more of these shelters open, there have been more and more protests against these shelters.

Also, on the other hand, a lot of the migrants who are working in the city, who have found jobs as delivery people or as candy sellers or whatever, have, you know, already, like other immigrants to New York, they've become part of the fabric of the city. Obviously, you know, immigration and immigration from the southern border is a huge national issue in the upcoming race. And, you know, Trump's pitch, his anti-migrant pitch has resonated with a lot of voters, including some who are sympathetic to immigrants and who, you know, would want to welcome them in a way, but may believe that, you know, the country's employment opportunities and public resources are not unlimited and that there needs to be some limit. And, you know, while it's not an open border, when people see video of folks waiting across the Rio Grande, it creates maybe an alarming impression.

I'm just wondering, New York is a huge city. And do you have an opinion? You're not covering the economy per se. Do you have an opinion about whether it can absorb 150,000 migrants in its economy without doing economic damage. I think once people have the ability to work, it can absolutely absorb that many migrants. The city lost a couple hundred thousand people during the first couple of years of the pandemic. So there is definitely space. What there is not is affordable housing.

That is a problem that is perhaps worse in New York City than just about any city in the country except maybe San Francisco. It is a phenomenally expensive place to live. Rents for even a one-bedroom apartment are often $2,000 or $3,000. So if the housing part of the problem can be tackled, and the housing part of the problem is one of the main things that's keeping the shelter population so high because people just have very few affordable places to live. If the housing issue can be tackled, for centuries, New York City has been a magnet for immigrants, and it has absorbed 100,000 migrants in a year many, many, many times. So it's not literally that there was no room for people. It's that it's unsustainable for the city to have to house and feed this many people indefinitely. You know, the bipartisan deal that was developing in the Senate appears is not going to pass. And so the immigration laws are not going to change for this election year, it seems. What's your sense of what New York is in store for over the coming year?

And don't forget that one of the things in that border deal that seems doomed was going to be a lot of aid for cities like New York and Denver and Chicago that are housing a lot of immigrants. So it's not just a matter of tighter controls at the border that was lost when that deal fell through. It is a bunch of money that could have been coming to the cities that is on hold again. As far as what will happen to New York over the next year or two, it's a really interesting question. For the last month or two, the city has actually been able to reduce the number of migrants in the shelter system. It's down about 5%. Part of that is the new limits that the city is putting on how long people can stay in shelters and the pressure that it's putting on people to leave. Part of it, though, is also that there's just seasonal fluctuations in border crossings. And we just

learned that in January, the number of people crossing the border illegally fell by 50%. It's not clear how much of that is just a seasonal thing and how much of that is due to other kind of national and international border politics. But as far as what this holds for the city in its future, it's very hard to say. The city does not want to have, you know, basically a permanent extra three or four or five billion dollars that it needs to raise. But right now, there doesn't seem to be an alternative to that. You know, we interview a lot of reporters here. And one of the things I always do is look at their bios on, you know, the webpage of the publication they work for. Your bio page for The New York Times is longer

and much more interesting than many I read. You know, I think a lot of reporters who cover the city for The New York Times see it as a stepping stone. You know, they want to make it to Washington and cover the Pentagon or Congress or go overseas or cover national politics. I sense that you really love engaging with and reporting on the life of the city. I feel like I could easily spend the rest of my life reporting on the life of the city and never run out of fascinating things to write about. I've been only reporting on New York and the surrounding area for my whole time at the Times. And I did a series on jobs where I was a delivery bike rider for Grubhub and Uber Eats. I have written about transit, religion, mosquito control.

Like, there is no end to the things in New York that make for very, very compelling stories. Among your stories was a story about a turf war in Manhattan between ice cream vendors. You want to give us the thumbnail of this? The thumbnail of this is that Mr. Softee is kind of synonymous with soft ice cream trucks. They have the do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, the jingle that everyone knows. I think it's not just in New York, but in some other cities also. And several years ago, kind of an upstart ice cream truck company started by former Mr. Softee drivers basically took over Mr. Softee's turf in much of Manhattan and enforced it in a little bit thuggish ways. There were a lot of threats.

There were, if a Mr. Softee driver came onto this other company's turf, they would kind of pull their trucks in and box them in so that he couldn't do business. There was one ice cream truck driver who I interviewed who talked about how everybody who drives an ice cream truck keeps a baseball bat in their truck. And it's not for, you know, robbers who are going to hold you up. It's for

other ice cream trucks that you need to face off with. Wow. The ice cream is soft, but the drivers aren't. Very much not. That was really interesting, that story, because it seemed like the executives weren't talking to you, but a few of the drivers said, yeah, you know, this is physical. Well, Andy Newman, thank you so much for speaking with us. Thank you, Dave. Andy Newman is a city reporter for the New York Times focusing on homelessness, poverty, and social services. For the past two years, he's been writing about the impact of migrants streaming into New York from the U.S.-Mexico border. Coming up, book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new detective novel that's an alternate history.

It imagines an America where Native Americans flourished and exerted political power. We'll be right back. This is Fresh Air. Novelist Francis Spufford's latest work of alternative historical fiction is called Cahokia Jazz. It's a hard-boiled detective novel that imagines an America where Native Americans weren't decimated by smallpox brought over by Europeans, but rather flourished and exerted political power. The novel is set in the 1920s, but our book critic Maureen Corrigan says that its vision of democracy straining at the seams looks awfully familiar. Here's her review.

Much of the action of Francis Buffard's latest novel, Cahokia Jazz, plays out in the shadows, beginning with its opening scene, at first glance, a classic noir tableau. On a wet night, two police detectives stand on the roof of a downtown office building and stare at the corpse of a white man splayed out on a skylight. But look closer. The corpse has been eviscerated. This was a heartless crime, Wisecrack's the meaner of the two detectives. Here's something else to consider. The skylight the victim was bound to with rope is shaped like a pyramid. In another city, that would be a curious but relatively inconsequential detail. But this is Cahokia. In this city, the gutting of a white man atop a pyramid harkens back to Aztec ritual sacrifices, and by extension, the indigenous civilization that once flourished in the area.

In the actual history of the Americas, Cahokia, a site outside present-day St. Louis, was the largest urban center north of Mexico before the arrival of Columbus. Today, only some 80 man-made mounds testify to the remains of the ancient city. In Spufford's mashup of noir with alternative history, however, the lost city of Cahokia endured and evolved into a modern metropolis whose indigenous, white, and African-American populations live in cautious harmony. Now, the grisly murder threatens to destabilize that democratic concord. This story, after all, is set in 1922, a time when the Ku Klux Klan is ascendant, especially in the Midwest. Cahokia is an outlier, a place where the color line doesn't exist. Utopia it ain't. Much of the city is dirty, cramped, and dangerous, but Cahokia is a rough zone of possibility.

It takes brick upon brick of details to erect a city that never was on the foundations of one that's vanished. As he's done in his previous historical novels, Golden Hill and Light Perpetual. Spufford layers this novel with period details. Here he supplies fictitious maps, backstories, and historical documents allegedly authored by Jesuit missionaries and founding fathers. Spufford even draws upon an old trade jargon to flesh out a language, anopa, that's used in Cahokia, and he scatters phrases liberally throughout the novel. World building can be a tedious project, and there are stretches, especially early on, where Cahokia Jazz threatens to buckle under the weight of all these details. Fortunately, the other police detective on the roof that night emerges out of the shadows to come to the rescue of this novel and its dark and desperate promise of American redemption. Joe Barrow is the brooding moral center of this story, the man who leads us readers through the maze of this mystery and makes us care about who's

generating and profiting from all this divisive chaos. Like every tough guy detective who's ever walked the mean streets of pulp, Barrow is both within and without. He's a cop who itches to throw his badge away and play jazz piano. He's part Native American and part black, a so-called thrown-away boy who was raised in an orphanage and understands fewer phrases of an opah than his white partner does. Now, in the wake of the pyramid murder, the city splinters into racial factions, and Barrow, the man without a fixed sense of identity, must choose one. In a cinematic scene, Barrow finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time as a massive mob of Klan members pours into the center of the city to stake a claim for white rule. Here's the climactic moment where the mob and Barrow meet. Barrow looked at the mob and saw in them his undoing, not just the chance of his death, but the undoing of his doubts. He might be endlessly uncertain

what he was. They weren't. They would see, they were seeing, a big brown man to play with, a toy for people angry that till now they'd not be allowed here to be the biggest things in the world. Spufford clearly has a blast in Cahokia jazz, summoning up the language and all the traditional tropes of a 1920s hard-boiled tale. The femme fatale, the crooked cops, politicians, and rich guys, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin. He dexterously weds all of them to an alternative American history narrative that pointedly comments on the present. In the compelling character of Joe Barrow, a mostly decent man trying to make sense of a fallen world, many of us readers will recognize our own held-breath bafflement, caught as we are

on the darkling plane of our own barely believable times. Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Cahokia Jazz by Frances Spofford. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.