I once performed in a dystopian musical where the blue-collar masses had to pay the government for the privilege to pee. The poor in Urinetown who accidentally pissed themselves without paying would be hauled off to jail by cops.
Years later, I find myself in a similar dystopia which I wrote about for Voice of San Diego’s “Beef Week” series. Urine is the great unifier, I discovered, as many San Diegans shared their own sanitation struggles after the story went to press.
One woman in Escondido wrote on Reddit that 7-Eleven employees denied they had a bathroom for her to use while she was “very pregnant.”
“I went out back and pissed into a cup in my car and left it behind the 7-Eleven,” she wrote.
Another person said, “I never had to piss on the open street or a random bush until moving to SD, put it that way.”
Another person wrote to me to say they had a marvelously easy time peeing while on vacation in New Zealand, both at free public toilets and pay-to-pee stalls (the latter which are illegal in California). A solar-powered bathroom company called Throne invited me to test out “the first smart, portable public bathroom” on display at Balboa Park’s December Nights this month.
The prefabricated stalls are monitored remotely and require a text, app or tap card to enter. Throne is in talks with the city about potentially installing some around San Diego, confirmed city spokesperson Nicole Darling. Los Angeles Metro already contracts with the company.
The problem is so profound in San Diego, San Diego State University started a research effort called the Project for Sanitation Justice. They began with what they thought would be a simple goal: Locate and map all public restroom facilities across San Diego County. The project director, Megan Welsh Carroll, wrote me after my story published to say the city of San Diego’s available bathroom map, as previously advertised by Mayor Todd Gloria, doesn’t tell the full story. The project published its own warring map to show that.
“Outside of regular business hours, there are only two public (built or permanent) restrooms open and available in the entire downtown area,” Welsh Carroll wrote. “This continues to be a public health and human dignity concern.”
The researchers don’t count porta potties as bathrooms on their map. The city does.
“Porta Potties don’t provide the same level of water, hygiene and sanitation access,” Welsh Carroll said.
A lot of readers blamed “the homeless,” “drug users,” “drunks” and “vandals” for destroying the public restroom landscape. Sometimes it’s true. The pastor of City Life Church posted a photo Monday of a bombed-out public bathroom at Dennis V. Allen Park in Mount Hope. But he didn’t wholly blame the vandal.
“It’s difficult to expect the community to cherish their community space when it looks like the local government doesn’t care about it,” Dale Huntington told me.
People want nice places to relieve themselves. There’s a reason we dub the toilet, “the throne.” Public restrooms were once a point of pride for American cities. But social elites began to associate these public-private spaces as breeding grounds for behavior and people they didn’t want to see.
More Sordid American Public Restroom History
For the birth of public restrooms in the nation you can thank another great American invention: the saloon, according to historian Peter C. Baldwin. The saloon loo offered the only option in urban areas and barkeeps viewed them as customer bait: Buy a beer, take a leak. The cycle continued.
Hotels, department stores and railroad stations started to offer customers a place to go, but screened out people of color or the working class. Public urination became common. Progressive reformers joined by elite women’s groups started pushing for city-run toilets, writes Matthew Wills for JSTOR Daily, and by 1919 over 100 cities had public comfort stations. Mayors used to host ribbon-cuttings and brag about new restrooms, said Bryant Simon, a historian at Temple University who is writing a book on the life and death of the public restroom.
“If you wanted to avail yourself of everything a city has to offer, you need a landscape of public bathrooms that provide privacy and protect from shame,” Simon said of the era. Cities built beautiful restrooms hoping that “immigrants and the poor would see an orderly form of excretion with sinks and handwashing, and they’d want that in their personal lives.”
Prohibition hit. The saloons closed and so did their toilets. Cities had little help adding to their bathroom network through the Great Depression. Reports of men having sex with men in public restrooms triggered homophobic panic, and the United States witnessed its second wave of public restroom closures through the 1950s. Middle and upper class women began to retreat from public restrooms and back to department stores and hotels.
Racism infiltrated the restroom space as local governments told citizens who could pee where. White people, and a significant tax base, retreated into the suburbs causing urban restrooms to deteriorate further. Into the 1980s the bathroom was a thing outsourced to the private sector, which didn’t want the responsibility.
The public restroom, Baldwin wrote, was pretty much always a thing reserved for the privileged class. Bodily privacy is something you purchase, a commodity, not a right for all citizens guaranteed by the government.
“This is about building boundaries. About the government playing a pretty heavy-handed role in making identity,” Simon said.
In Other News
- There’s not one shred of serious scientific evidence against the fluoridation of drinking water. (Los Angeles Times)
- Gov. Gavin Newsom said he’d reboot the state’s clean vehicle rebate program if Donald Trump cuts the federal one. (Associated Press)
- Amid skepticism and fear in some San Diego communities about fires, California state lawmakers want permit reform to speed-up construction of batteries that store renewable energy. (Voice of San Diego)
- Carlsbad considers building a solar farm near a reservoir (not on one, like in Sweetwater) but concerns about battery fires are creeping into the discussion. (Union-Tribune)
- More battery news: A local family that owns land in Valley Center say it’s safe to build a battery project there. Some residents still worry about fires and the battery ruining the character of the community. (Union-Tribune)
- It’s North versus South over dwindling Colorado River water. Northern states say they’re conserving lots of water and don’t want to give up more. They have to adjust use depending on how much snow falls. Southern states say, too bad. (KUNC)
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