Editorial: In 1967 and 2023, too little room at the Inn of Chicago.

Often headlined “Mary and Joseph in Chicago,” Mike Royko’s 1967 Christmas essay had the unique distinction of being reprinted for years by all three Chicago newspapers for which the late, great columnist worked, including this one.

In Royko’s 56-year-old story, once a staple of this season, Joe and Mary were a penniless couple, unhoused and wandering around Chicago. They sought shelter even as they were shunted from one social service agency to another.

This is how the column started:

Mary and Joe were flat broke when they got off the bus in Chicago. They didn’t know anybody and she was expecting a baby. They went to a cheap hotel. But the clerk jerked his thumb at the door when they couldn’t show a day’s rent in advance. They walked the streets until they saw a police station. The desk sergeant said they couldn’t sleep in a cell, but he told them how to get to a welfare office.

A man there said they couldn’t get regular assistance because they hadn’t been Illinois residents long enough. But he gave them the address of the emergency welfare office on the West Side. It was a two-mile walk up Madison Street. Someone gave them a card with a number on it and they sat down on a bench, stared at the peeling green paint and waited for their number to be called.

Royko’s column, which ends with Mary and Joe setting off on foot down Route 66, heading as far away as possible from the cold hearts of Chicago, has particular resonance this Christmas Day, the first since busloads of asylum-seekers arrived in Chicago from the U.S. border and got the same kind of welcome that Royko imagined for his fictional domestic migrants in 1967.

The 2023 migrants, all unused to a Chicago winter, have found themselves freezing on the sidewalk outside police stations, crammed together in unhealthy former industrial buildings, or suggested as suitable campers for a patch of Chicago land long contaminated by chemicals.

Last Thursday night, just a block or two west of where our newspaper is printed, a huge migrant tent camp seemed to have sprouted under an overpass viaduct, spilling onto sidewalks. A new Chicago police station seemed to have suddenly opened, too, just around the corner from where Halsted Street, Grand Avenue and Milwaukee Avenue all collide.

But while the authenticity was impressive at first glance, the glass police-station storefront was a giveaway and, on closer inspection, lights, smoke machines and other moviemaking equipment could be seen among all the ragged tents. This was a shoot for the hit TV show, “Chicago P.D.,” and there was even a sign on the sidewalk to reassure worried passersby: “Don’t be alarmed.”

The TV producers need not have worried. Plenty of real migrant tent camps on Chicago sidewalks have not alarmed most people, who just averted their eyes.

It appeared the writers of the procedural series had walked around town, opened their eyes and then set about duplicating real life in Chicago this fall, for international consumption. Migrant families freezing on a Chicago sidewalk, scared for the health of their children, is a dramatic situation that virtually writes itself.

For anybody walking by, the sight suggested an ethical dilemma.

Was it right for the TV show to dramatize what we’ve all viewed around the city these last few weeks? Or was this taking advantage of human misery? And if a production company could stand up just such a community in just a few hours, why had Chicago so struggled to do anything comparable in real life?

Bizarrely, the encampment was larger, and the tents nicer, than the crammed footprints we’d seen elsewhere. The fake migrants, it seemed, had been given more space to inhabit than the actual migrants.

We all walked on by, of course, headed indoors for a warm, festive drink with colleagues while shaking our heads. We tried to put the movie shoot out of our minds, but it lingered as an image of this city this Christmas, one about to be beamed around the world. “Chicago P.D.” is a global franchise.

It’s true that many nonprofit organizations, faith-based groups and individual Chicagoans have stepped up to make things better for the migrant families, whiplashed by federal inaction at the border and by political rivalries between different areas of this country. Many public officials at all levels of government care deeply about this problem and have acted accordingly. Some progress has been made.

But the migrants have been footballs, nonetheless, kicked from one place to another. The welcome they have received is not one any Chicagoan would wish for their own family.

On this Christmas Day, we could all vow to do better to help solve what has become Chicago’s most pressing problem and find a better room or two at our inn.

“I still don’t like the column,” Royko wrote, 25 years after it was first published. We have a sense why.

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