June 4, 2024
A Gazette Editorial
Denial. It’s not just a river in Egypt. It’s NYC’s official public restroom policy.
First, the good news is that Borough President Mark Levine and NYC Mayor Eric Adams are, at long last, making some progress on the matter of public rest rooms. This week they announced the “UR in Luck” initiative, a new effort to expand New Yorkers’ access to public restrooms. According to the Mayor’s Office, the idea is to build 46 new restrooms and renovate 36 existing restrooms in public parks over the next five years, including 28 in Manhattan. There will even be a Google maps layer to point out the locations. The bad news is nobody can wait 5 years to use a bathroom.
Or, you can open an Excel spreadsheet.
As anyone who’s ever heard Nature’s Call will tell you, time is measured in minutes, not in years, when you have to go. While it’s a very good thing that Adams and Levine are doing here, it’s a drop in the bucket in terms of the need. What are people supposed to do in the meantime? At a recent public, permitted event at Crotona Park in the Bronx, a rally for former President Trump, thousands of people were expected to show up for an event scheduled for 6PM, and that’s exactly what did happen. The problem? The Parks Department public restrooms closed at 4PM, per their normal, posted operating hours. Wasn’t it entirely foreseeable that some of the thousands of attendees would need to use those facilities and that keeping them open a few hours longer that day would be the right thing to do? How many desperate, illegal leaks were taken in the bushes that day? Who knows?
There was recent a news report about a Mom being summonsed in Battery Park City when her 4 year old child couldn’t hold it any longer. Leaving aside the stupidity and callousness of punishing a parent who saw no alternative in the moment, the incident simply underscores the City’s epic denial of the problem: there’s a longstanding and severe lack of public facilities right now. Was this Mom and her child supposed to wait a month for the Mayor to announce this new program and then wait 5 years for its completion?
UR out of Luck!
On a recent walk through Inwood Hill Park some portable toilets were seen down by the soccer field. Progress at last, it seemed, but sadly, no. Inexplicably, the trio of porta-potties was padlocked shut and rendered useless to the public. And don’t even get us started on the Nature Center restrooms that were shut down for a decade following Superstorm Sandy. Yet if you’ve ever attended one of the big concerts in Central Park, you’ve seen the the massive banks of portable johns they deploy temporarily when lots people are expected. Just like security, lighting, the sound system, insurance, and so on, the organizers recognize the need for facilities for people to use at their event. They call a company and, based on expected attendance, order an appropriate number of stalls – and it’s usually a lot of them. The City may even require them to do it. After the concert ends, the company collects them and that’s that.
A Simple Solution.
That’s exactly how difficult it would be for the City to do the same thing: somebody just has to pick up a phone and make a call. They could do it this afternoon if they wanted: just call a company that provides portable johns and explain the need: site enough of them Citywide so nobody has to travel more than a couple of blocks to find one. The contractor can site and then clean or swap them out them daily. Inwood residents have been walking past dozens of portable toilet stalls the past few years at the many construction sites up here. Unfortunately, they’re for the exclusive use of crews building the new towers, but it demonstrates that it can be done.
There’s a fire hydrant on every block just in case there’s an emergency. Most of those hydrants are rarely used in the context of a fire, thankfully. But they’re available every day, just in case they’re needed. People don’t have the option of waiting years when they need to pee, or of walking very far. This is a scientific fact. It’s a completely foreseeable ’emergency’ that undoubtedly happens many times every day across the City. Either we come up with a solution now or accept that the nuisance of public urination will continue. Those are the only options, really. Dozens of new bathrooms in a few years will be a great improvement in our quality of life, but it does absolutely NOTHING to solve the problem now.
The City should address the urgent need for public restrooms with an interim solution and then it can take as long as it needs to build a network of permanent public facilities.