Yes We Can Can? Council Renews Push for More Public Restrooms but Success May Prove E-loo-sive

These are the days that try men’s prostates. They are also the days that try the bladders of women (especially pregnant women), children and anyone who’s just gotta gotta gotta go— please!— and yet finds themselves foiled from “legally” doing so for lack of an open—or often any—restroom.

The issue of New York’s abject failure to create and maintain adequate public restrooms is longstanding. In November 2007, Sewell Chan, reporting on the toilet beat for the New York Times defunct City Room section gave a brief history of the issue, which in general has only trended worse.

The closure of numerous Barnes & Noble locations, with their long hours and generally well-maintained bathrooms, was a palpable loss to public toilet partisans. Likewise, the devolution of Starbucks, some locations of which no longer have a public restroom, including their 120 Church Street store, very near City Hall.

In June, Mayor Adams announced a plan to build 46 new public restrooms and renovate 36 more over the next five years. This was welcome news but who can hold it in that long?

The City Council has recently applied itself to the people’s pee and poop problems too.

First came a report Council issued report, cleverly titled “Nature’s Call,” which examined the condition of 51 men’s and women’s restrooms (102 total) in the city’s public parks from July 9-11.

The results were disconcerting, if unsurprising to frequent park users: 11% of stalls lacked functioning locks (a statistic which, while annoying isn’t a serious problem given the alternatives); 13% lacked toilet paper (this is a serious problem); 40% were littered (a number not so bad when 30% of the bathrooms lacked garbage cans); and 23% featured “unsanitary conditions.”

“Unsanitary”? How so?

No, forget that question! It’s too disturbing—and depressing—to answer, though anyone who regularly visits heavily used restrooms like those at Seward Park on the Lower East Side has horror stories to share.

The Council report also noted that 9% of the restrooms couldn’t be inspected because they were closed. Why?

The report doesn’t say, and while there are many possible reasons including a Park’s worker being late or absent that day, one not uncommon cause for restrooms being closed is drug addicts.

At the ballfields (and the presently closed track) in Red Hook, Brooklyn, for example, which on busy weekends attracts thousands of baseball, soccer, lacrosse, football, rugby, racquetball and lacrosse players from across the city, the single public restroom has been closed for months because multiple junkies overdosed inside.

Straus News was told this by a Park’s worker, which information was confirmed by local cops. So, instead junkies shoot up in public—including in local parks and playgrounds—leaving their used needles behind while everyone else is forced to hold it in, or pee against a fence, or run into the nearby Ikea, whose bathrooms are splendid, it must be said.

That’s not all. There are also restrooms that closed not just to keep junkies from dying inside but because “scrappers,” have stolen exposed pipes from the sinks.

It’s quite likely that at least one Manhattan park or playground restroom will be closed for similar reasons today. So much for “harm reduction.”

This is not the Parks Department fault. They are constrained by budget, staffing, and authority limitations. Were there Parks Enforcement Patrol officers and police enough to remove every drug addict, drug dealer, and thief from the parks and playgrounds, the overwhelming majority of New Yorkers would cheer.

The same goes for the city’s most volatile homeless and mentally ill people, who place a vastly disproportionate burden on public restroom facilities. The city should offer them help, of course, but for God’s sake, don’t let them drop a deuce on the bathroom floor again.

While various “advocates” might wish to deny these issues, the street facts—which are the facts that really matter—are incontrovertible.

How else to explain, for example, that one of Manhattan’s most attractive—and well-funded—public spaces, Madison Square Park, has no bathrooms at all? That’s zero, none, nada, zilch—despite a lovely children’s playground on the north end named in memory of Police Officer Moira Reddy Smith from the 13th Pct. who died on 9-11 and a popular Shake Shack location on the south.

What does the Conservancy know that the Parks Department doesn’t, and why, in any sane city, are they allowed to get away it?

Actually, the Parks Department does know, which is why what were once public restrooms in Stuyvesant Square Park are now closed for the exclusive use “Parks Department Employees Only.” Even Tompkins Square Park, whose restrooms are under renovation, again has a trio of portable toilets on site, though, as reported by the East Village blog, EV Grieve, it took community protests to get them in the first place.

Why—for decades!— was the otherwise beloved Jefferson Market Library allowed to have no public restroom for adults? If one had a child to bring in with them—or were wily enough to borrow someone else’s kid for the occasion—they could use the children’s restroom but otherwise, tough luck. (Since its reopening in July 2022, the Jefferson Market Library has had a public adult restroom on its basement floor. Frequent long lines attest to its popularity.)

If some City Council members get their way, things might improve.

On September 19, the so-called “Free to Pee” coalition railed on the steps of City Hall in support of two related bathroom bills. One, spearheaded by Council Member Rita Joseph of Brooklyn and supported by Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine among many others, would require the Commissioner of Citywide Administrative Services to make bathrooms available in various public facing city buildings.

“Access to clean and accessible bathrooms in New York City should not be a luxury,” City Council member Rita Joseph at a hearing after the rally. “Too often residents of this city have to concede to business owners for bathroom access, sometimes making unnecessary purchases just to use the facilities,” she added, calling the right to relieve oneself in a decent bathroom a “basic human right.”

While sympathizing with the bill’s intent, the city’s Chief public realm officer Ya-Ting Liu argued against opening bathroom doors of more municipal buildings to the public. “For means of security and other considerations it’s for people with business inside the building,” she contended.

Brooklyn Council Member Sandy Nurse, meanwhile, is pushing another, more ambitious bill calling for the city to build one public restroom for every 2,000 New Yorkers within a decade.

“We cannot be criminalizing people for a human function that every single person has,” Nurse said, noting that the NYPD issued 9,904 criminal and civil summonses for public urination over the last fiscal year— a whopping 46% increase from the previous year.

Gee whiz!