Cynthia Rivera, 33, was on her routine walk home from work when she felt the sudden urge to use the bathroom. About eight months pregnant and 10 minutes away from her own bathroom, she decided she couldn’t wait and looked for a place where she could relieve herself.
Not finding success after stopping into a Chipotle with an out-of-order bathroom, she tried the supermarket next door, which had no customer restroom. With the threat of a public accident looming nearer, she finally found somewhere to relieve herself in a nearby store gracious enough to let her use their employee bathroom.
The ordeal was over and Rivera was saved from the embarrassment of peeing herself in public. But her story is just a small piece in the bigger picture of New York City’s bathroom problem — and it is no accident.
A city of more than 8 million people, New York lacks a robust system of public toilets. With just 1,103 of them, there is only one public restroom for every 7,700 New Yorkers. This presents a big problem, especially for pregnant women, parents with children, homeless people, and those with gastrointestinal issues or UTIs.
But a lack of public restrooms is everyone’s problem. A 2022 survey by the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation found that 20 percent of respondents reported having a public urinary or bowel accident — and a vast majority cite a lack of public restrooms as a reason for those accidents.
Rivera says that her frequent need to use the bathroom has caused trouble when it comes to leaving her house.
“Something that seems so small is very anxiety inducing,” she says. “You feel so trapped. What am I gonna do, pee on the street in broad daylight?”
Pregnant women’s bodies produce a hormone known as human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG, which triggers more frequent urination. Rivera says that, at the most frequent, she needs to use the restroom every 20 to 30 minutes.
“I think about the bathroom a lot,” she says.
One of the first public restrooms in New York City was built in Astor Place in 1869, a time when access to private toilets in homes was still a luxury. It was only in 1901 that proper plumbing became required, mandated by the New York State Tenement House Act. Until then, most residents in the city did not own an indoor toilet and relied on outhouses and chamber pots. Three decades later, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses spearheaded efforts to build hundreds of new parks and pools in the city, and alongside them came “comfort stations” that included bathrooms and showers.
These park bathrooms take up a majority of public restrooms in New York City. Other locations include subway stations and automated public toilets, or APTs. There are just five APTs in New York City, while Berlin has 418, despite having half the population of New York.
Everyone needs public toilets. For such a universal need, the city seems to be significantly lacking facilities to support its 8 million residents and its 60 million tourists each year.
So where are New York City’s public restrooms?
Jennifer Gaboury, a Women and Gender Studies professor at Hunter College and lecturer of a Bathroom Studies course, says finding the space in the densest city in America is part of the issue.
“What dictates where there is a public bathroom has to do with what's required in the building code and by how much space there is,” she says. In New York, public restrooms are not required in spaces of less than 300 square feet.
A bigger issue, however, has to do with the stigma that comes with bodily functions. Gaboury deems this phenomenon as “disgust factors.”
“People are afraid of contact with other people, with body parts, with body fluids, with people across class differences,” she says. “America is very committed to individual spaces, like cars.”
Hesitation to share public spaces is found everywhere, but especially in bathrooms, a place that gets dirtier quicker than anywhere else does. While this general disgust plays a big role, alongside it is the shame with even discussing the matter.
“My mom would always be like, ‘what happens in the bathroom stays in the bathroom,’” says Teddy Siegel, founder of Got2GoNYC, a guide to free restrooms in New York. It started when Siegel began documenting public restroom locations on TikTok back in 2021.
Eventually, a Google Map was made — which would become the largest and most frequently used map on the platform, and in the world — and a community that advocates for wider public restroom access formed.
For Siegel, the stigma is a big roadblock in the fight for more public restrooms. But with a community of half a million followers across platforms and a face attached to the movement, she says that that’s changing.
“I didn’t even put my face on my account for the first six months,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone knowing it was me. I felt like it was so embarrassing and weird.”
But as her platform started to gain traction, people started submitting stories of their frustrations in finding public restrooms. It was then she realized the bigger issue at hand.
“It is so privileged to be able to walk into any cafe and buy a coffee for five dollars to use the bathroom and not really think twice about it, ” Siegel says.
Since then, the 24-year-old has worked with Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine to pass Intro 258, or “The Bathroom Bill,” using her platform to advocate and support the campaign.
Passed last spring, the bill calls for a public restroom to be built in every New York City ZIP code. It required the Department of Transportation and the Department of Parks to submit reports of feasible locations by June of the same year.
The stigma represents just one part of the complicated web of reasons why the city lacks a public toilet system. Other components include racial, class and gender discrimination.
Bathroom bills and the backlash that has followed them is nothing new. When Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 in June of 1941, racial discrimination in all public facilities, including bathrooms, became prohibited. Protests against the order soon followed, citing the potential violence and disease that would be inflicted on white women who share public restrooms with Black women.
During the height of World War II, Baltimore-based manufacturing company Western Electric, which produced heavy-duty electric wires and cables used by the military, followed the executive order and announced it would no longer provide separate facilities for its white and Black employees. The company’s white employees found these new rules abhorrent, protesting with walkouts and purposefully doing their jobs inefficiently.
For them, desegregated toilets meant mixing the bodily fluids of clean and pure white bodies with Black bodies rampant with foul smells and disease. For months, the company and its union of workers were locked into a battle, with the union of almost all white people protesting against the unification of the facilities, eventually striking in mid-December of 1943.
“We Want Separate Facilities,” read one sign. “Why Should We Be Used as Guinea Pigs?” screamed another, capturing the fear fueled by racist pseudoscience among the strikers.
Eventually, President Roosevelt ordered the U.S. Army to step in and seize operations. While they made sure production still took place, by the time they left, bathrooms and locker rooms were once again segregated.
Stories like the one that unfolded at Western Electric were commonplace. But the fears that prompted the protests have their roots in the decades that came before they took place, in the 1920s and 30s. As public sewage systems improved and bodily waste became less and less of a public hazard, urban landscapes became more and more aware of cleanliness — and in turn, uncleanliness.
It was simple — white people were clean, and anyone who wasn’t was dirty. Studies like the infamous “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” which experimented on 600 impoverished Black men to study the illness, spurred the idea that Black bodies contained “bad blood” and were particularly susceptible to disease.
The idea still persists to this day. The same 2022 study by the Crohn's & Colitis Foundation found that 21 percent of white respondents were denied public restroom access while 27 percent of non-white respondents were denied.
In 2018, the now-infamous case of two Black men being arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks after being denied restroom access without purchasing anything sparked national outrage. Though a later police report revealed that the men repeatedly cursed at the manager and insulted police, Starbucks’ reputation suffered as conversations of racial discrimination and bias began to take hold. The incident prompted the company to adopt an open-bathroom policy, allowing anyone, even those who have not purchased anything, to use their bathrooms.
While the incident cemented the chain as “America’s toilet,” the company’s facilities have served bathroom-goers throughout the country for decades beforehand, providing crucial support in a city with few other options.
In 2011, The New York Times reported on Starbucks baristas, tired of cleaning “every humanly fluid that didn’t seem human,” locking the doors to their restrooms.
A wave of news coverage followed. Advertised as a place where patrons could unwind without being rushed out the door with a check, Starbucks was the Mecca of public restrooms. Taking them away meant nothing but trouble for those with full bladders.
While the company has since retracted its open-door policy, citing safety concerns for their employees in 2022, it raises an important question: what role can private businesses play in the public toilet system?
“The burden has fallen on establishments in the private sector to pick up the slack of the city’s failures,” Siegel says. In New York City, “Restrooms for Customers Only” signs adorn shop windows.
Businesses in the city are not required by law to open their restrooms to the public — unless you have a medical condition, supported by documentation, that requires urgent access to a toilet. Restaurants that seat below 20 patrons aren’t required to have a customer toilet at all. While places like food courts and malls provide public restrooms, they are not required to do so.
While safety for employees, vandalism and other illicit activities are a big concern for business owners, a public-private partnership may be a potential solution for the bathroom crisis. In England, private businesses like bars, restaurants and retail stores that open their restrooms to the public are given a 100 percent relief on business rates, or taxes, in exchange.
Instead of building new facilities, utilizing the existing infrastructure may be a key answer in solving New York’s bathroom problem — the average park comfort station can cost upwards of 3.6 million taxpayer dollars to build, excluding daily maintenance.
On May 3, Mayor Eric Adams announced a $55 million budget cut to the city’s libraries and parks. Set to take effect July 1, the proposed cuts will result in a loss of over 600 jobs, advocates say.
“It means our parks will not be cleaned, bathrooms won’t be cleaned, trash cans overflowing, trees overgrowing,” Shekar Krishan, chair of the City Council Parks and Recreation Committee, told Spectrum News NY1.
While bigger parks like Central Park and Prospect Park have their own conservancies that don’t solely depend on the NYC Parks budget, most don’t. This means parks and their facilities that lack the funding for a conservancy, most of them in low-income areas that already lack green spaces and public restrooms, will get less money and less care.
When it comes to access to clean and safe public restrooms, inequity seems to be a prominent issue. A 2019 New York City Comptroller report, “Discomfort Stations,” found a quarter of NYC Parks bathrooms to be in an “unacceptable” condition, either due to “multiple features being unsatisfactory,” “one feature having serious safety hazard,” or having a “failed cleanliness rating.”
Among the surveyed areas the highest of them was Chinatown and the Lower East Side, with 40 percent of their bathrooms deemed unacceptable. The poverty rate in the neighborhood is a staggering 26 percent, compared to the citywide rate of 18 percent.
Following closely was East Harlem with a 33 percent rate of unacceptable bathrooms, coupled with a 38.2 percent poverty rate, 20.2 percent higher than the citywide average.
“It’s a representation issue,” says Julie Chou, an architect and founder of Purpose by Design Architects, a company that leads projects for residential, community and commercial space development. Back in 2020, Chou, along with urban planner Kevin Gurley and urban data analyst Boyeong Hong, cataloged all of New York City’s public restrooms.
The guide lists the different types of public restrooms found in the city — "comfort stations" found in New York City parks, MTA stations, APTs, privately owned public spaces (POPs), public pools, drop-in centers that service homeless people, and business improvement districts that drive traffic in commercial areas.
Chou and her colleagues cite the issue of public restrooms as a “basic need, public health concern, human rights concern, and quality of life concern.”
“If we don't mandate these things, you're restricting certain populations from not having access to that space, you're telling them they're not important,” Chou says.
New York City is home to around 100,000 unhoused people. At least 4,000 of them are unsheltered, living on subways and sleeping on the street. Public restroom access is an essential part to their survival.
A study done by the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy found that public toilets in Manhattan did not meet the menstrual hygiene management needs of women experiencing homelessness. Such inadequacies were only exacerbated by the COVID pandemic. At the height of the pandemic, Amtrak bathrooms at Penn Station were closed for cleanings multiple times a day, severely limiting access for the people that needed it the most.
Lack of municipal action is also at play.
Twenty years ago, when faced with the problem of a lack of public restrooms in New York City, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg quipped, “Why? There’s enough Starbucks that’ll let you use the bathroom.”
The statement, although made in jest, reflected the attitudes of Bloomberg’s policy-making when it came to public restrooms. By the end of his 11-year tenure as mayor, he had failed to make good on his promises for more public restrooms.
In 2006 Bloomberg signed a deal with Spanish advertisement company Cemusa, promising to bring $1.4 billion in revenue to New York City. The plan was to implement 20 APTs throughout the five boroughs, which the company estimated each of which would cost $500,000 to install and $40,000 to maintain annually.
Now, 18 years after the deal was signed, only five of these toilets have been installed. The remaining 15 are sitting in a Queens warehouse, unused. The 20-year contract is set to expire in less than two years, with no publicized timeline or plans to install them within the timeframe.
Last year, prompted by the concerns expressed to him about feelings of post-COVID loneliness, Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy published an advisory on the epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
The advisory contained a multitude of points on the risks of insufficient social connection, the most alarming of them being that the lack of human connection can increase risk of premature death as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day can.
The message was clear: American loneliness and isolation is a big problem and the health consequences will be severe if nothing is done about it.
Availability and accessibility to clean and safe public restrooms are a crucial component to a life of comfort and quality — that includes the ability to leave your home and know there will be someplace to go when you need to. Robert Moses understood the importance of having these facilities that allowed New Yorkers to “move beyond their homes and fully participate in the life of the city.”
While the city has plans to improve its bathroom problem, there’s no saying when the plans will come to fruition, if they do at all. More is being done by advocates like Teddy Siegel, who campaign for the issue to be destigmatized and more widely discussed.
For now, urgent bathroom-seekers in New York City will remain crosseyed–and cross-legged–in search of a place to relieve themselves. Others will cave and buy the five-dollar coffee.
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