There’s An App For That (Your Poop)
I have a mental map of everywhere in New York City I can freely do my business outside of my apartment in relative secrecy. There are the bathrooms halfway down the stairs to the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, where the stall doors are too squat but everything smells decent. There’s the 4th floor of Century 21, where nobody will find you amid the hoards of tourists ripping through discount prom dresses. There’s the door behind the children’s book section of the Union Square Barnes & Noble, and the basement of the Old Navy in SoHo, and Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station and the Port Authority. Of course there are plenty of diners and Starbucks’ where I could order a coffee in exchange, but this is not Urinetown. I have a volatile stomach and I should not have to pay to relieve it.
New York is not very welcome to my problems, but there are some solutions. There is now an app, Looie, where for $25 a month New Yorkers can reserve clean restrooms inside local businesses. It is only the latest in the many ways the sharing economy is trying to hack our bladders. Airpnp, Toilet Finder, and Nyrestroom.com all show us where in New York (and often the world) we can pee for something resembling free, whether it’s in exchange for the purchse of a coffee or just a dirty look and/or risk of expulsion from a hotel concierge. On a site like Nyrestroom, search for just “public restrooms” and the crowded map becomes painfully bare for such a dense city, especially considered most are in playgrounds, where adults are not allowed to enter without children. Why so few? And why should we be paying $25 for the privilege?
There used to be more. In subways you can still see them: scratched black doors with male and female caricatures. But like many restrooms in New York’s parks and other public spaces, they seem forever padlocked. Untapped Cities reported that out of the 129 bathrooms in the city’s subway stations, just 48 are unlocked, and I’m going to assume many of those aren’t handicap accessible. You’re basically shit out of luck (sorry) with any bathroom in public.
However, this is not a planned disruption on behalf of the sharing economy. They are just capitalizing on a system that long ago stopped considering public restrooms and public service, as well as a system that would rather not serve some members of the public.
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I vividly remember the first time I had to beg someone to let me use their restroom. My mom’s friend had treated us to dinner at a private social club in downtown Manhattan to celebrate my high school graduation. I drank a strawberry mojito and rubbed my arms down with the sheep milk lotion they stocked in the bathroom. On the walk home my stomach grumbled and cramped so badly I could barely walk, and we walked into a movie theater and convinced the ticket clerk that no, I had no interest in seeing whatever German film was playing that night, I just needed the restroom. He let me, but not without the embarrassing eye contact that let me know he knew exactly what I would be doing.
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The notion of a public bath, not just for relieving oneself but for the service of actual bathing, has a long history. Some date the first public bathrooms to 1700 B.C. One example is Emperor Caracalla, who made public baths a cornerstone of his rule. Their ruins still stand in Rome, a place where members of any social class could gather, socialize, and cleanse. It was a strategic move on Caracalla’s part, one that enamored him to the public now that they could associate him with such lavish and beautiful conditions.
The tradition of public bathing illustrates one of the basic ideas of humanity: “Public baths properly constructed and handled form one of the most effective and far-reaching of municipal institutions for the promotion of cleanliness, good health, and good citizenship,” wrote Scientific American in 1899.
In How The Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis wrote of the awful conditions facing the poor populations of the Lower East Side, and noted that many had little knowledge of or access to basic bathing facilities. Public baths became a matter of public health, and in the late 19th-century they could be found in all parts of the city. If you walk New York, you can still see the signs of where they stood. However, many of these baths were not open year-round, or were privately operated and required a small fee, according to New York’s Citizens Union. In their first pamphlet in 1897, they demanded “baths and lavatories adequate to public needs be established,” specifically to curtail the spread of infectious disease in the city’s poorer neighborhoods. Of the 255,033 households inspected by the Tenement House Commission in 1894, “only 306 persons had access to bathrooms in the houses in which they lived.”
Lavatories were an even bigger issue. “In the City of New York there is no provision for lavatories outside of the public parks,” leaving many to either buy a ticket to use the restrooms in ferries and subways, or buy a beer at a saloon. This was particularly tricky for policemen and street cleaners, who were not allowed to enter a saloon on duty, but often had to break that rule because there were no public lavatories in their vicinity. Unfortunately, they usually face the same problems today.
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Of all the clichés about moving in with a significant other, the one that I fell into completely was pretending not to poop. If I took too long in the bathroom I was simply washing my hands, or scrubbing the tub, or tweezing my eyebrows, anything to hide that I actually did take that long doing exactly what you think. I thought it plainly gross, and certainly not something the person I love should be subjected to knowing anything about, no matter how many times I had to stall plans or make emergency Pepto Bismol runs. I would rather he thought I was vomiting. I couldn’t admit that my body does what a body does.
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Things started getting better at the turn of the 20th century. in 1909 the Washington Herald noted that “it is not necessary to argue the need of public toilet facilities,” and that New York had recently built many “public comfort” stations. Things seemed to be on the rise. In 1934, Robert Moses opened 145 new public toilets. By 1940, there were 1,676 functioning toilets in the subway system, all of which received weekly inspections. Things probably weren’t as accessible for the handicapped or people of color, but at least the idea that public toilets should be available existed. So what happened?
All signs point to the 1970s, as crime and vandalism notoriously crept up. The MTA cited criminal activity as the main reason they padlocked or converted most of the restrooms, and it seems like many others just couldn’t be maintained. Pay toilets started popping up, but in 1975 an anti-pay toilet campaign successfully reached Albany and pay toilets were banned, on the grounds that they discriminated against women (the reasoning being that women had to use a stall but men could use a urinal for free, which, couldn’t you just build them with only stalls and make everyone pay the same??). In a way that was good because you shouldn’t have to pay to use these facilities, but nothing really replaced them.
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My favorite place to use the restroom continues to be at sports arenas and stadiums. Anywhere there are rows upon rows of stalls. In there, your business becomes anonymous. The line keeps moving, the doors keep opening, and nobody knows how long yours has been closed. And if anyone back at your seat asks what took so long, you can always say there was a wait.
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In 1990, a study by Legal Action Center for the Homeless found that only 34% of the public parks had at least one comfort station, just eight of the 389 public plazas had public toilet facilities, and that often none had toilet paper or soap. (I reached out to the Parks Department about the current toilet situation to no response.) They also noted that the public feared “risking their possessions and even lives” by entering an unattended public restroom, and that special harm is suffered by the homeless, for whom public toilets are the only form of “relief.”
Perhaps that’s exactly what Giuliani wanted. His plans for expanding New York’s public toilet were abandoned in 1998. A year later, he was quoted as saying that making welfare cuts to drive the homeless out of New York was “not an unspoken part of our strategy; it is our strategy.” If you don’t have an apartment to pee in, why should the city give you the place? If you can’t pay the $4 for a coffee, or if you don’t look respectable enough to be in the coffee shop in the first place, why should you get to pee? “It represents a reaction against the basic assumption of liberal urban policy, namely that government bears some responsibility for ensuring a decent minimum level of daily life for everyone,” wrote Neil Smith in Giuliani Time: The Revanchist 1990s. “That political assumption is now largely replaced by a vendetta against the oppressed.”
Aside from a few pay toilets installed during the Bloomberg administration, the city’s attempts at solving our bathroom problem have come from a private, parallel infrastructure. There were Charmin’s pop-up toilets in Times Square, Posh City club’s $8 memberships, and now apps like Looie. For the people who can pay $25 a month, the problem is solved, and to these businesses and customers they are the only people that matter. Money facilitates selfishness, sure, but also impatience. There is no point in bullying the government and advocating for public policy when you have money to throw at your problematic bowel movements (or transportation, or office space, or anything else currently being “disrupted”).
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As a society, we require that people not be covered in urine and fecal matter. This is, like, the baseline for human interaction, and we’ve gone about trying to ensure it in some pretty creative ways (meet you at the toilet museum).
But when we fail each other in this, the blame is not on the complications of setting up a comprehensive or safe sewage system, or the amount of water required to get that system to work, or the lack of government resources. The blame is on the individual. If people are inconvenienced by the lack of public amenities, we just publicly shame them. If you can’t hold it, you become the butt of poop jokes (like that one). It’s easier than talking about it, because we don’t want to. Responsible citizens pee before they leave the house. Responsible citizens don’t have “emergencies.” Responsible citizens always have a place to go. Somewhere else. Not here.
Jaya Saxena is writer and professional Prince impersonator.
