Philly has too few public bathrooms, and just lost one of its best

There are a lot of facets to the modern urban hellscape that make living in cities from Philadelphia to New York to Chicago to Los Angeles less convenient every year. Transit systems falling apart, jobs departing for the suburbs, and a refusal to tackle endemic, generational poverty.

In Philadelphia, there is one other thing that we are all, perhaps, a little too shy to talk about, that has made urban life occasionally unbearable and remarkably fraught: There are hardly any public bathrooms. With one of the last remaining public restrooms in Center City shutting down with the closing of Barnes and Noble, another brick has fallen from the once-mighty edifice of bathroom availability. (The Starbucks going in its place won’t have public bathrooms.)

I wager there is not a reader of this newspaper who has had to spend a day in Center City and desperately — desperately — needed a bathroom but found themselves up a certain creek without a paddle. (Or perhaps two miles away from where they were supposed to be, at that one Popeyes on Broad that allows you to use the bathroom if you buy a sandwich.)

It wasn’t always this way, and it doesn’t have to be.

The history of public restrooms is varied, but the golden age of going to the bathroom on your way to work is far in the rearview.

The reason for the closure of public and business restrooms across the country is simple: people abuse them. They are regularly vandalized — and more — which is basically a constant nuisance to the point of being permanent and unavoidable denigration for workers at places where public bathrooms are available. Messy public restrooms don’t just constitute an annoyance but are also a public health issue. Public defecation has led to multiple occurrences of hepatitis A in our neighborhoods.

» READ MORE: Philly could finally get public bathrooms. Are we ready for them? | Editorial

But the more immediate issue, and one that is pressing for Philadelphians, is the regular use of public restrooms by people using opioids. This is not just an issue for our unfairly overburdened fast food and gas station employees. Bathrooms in libraries across the country, including some in Pennsylvania, have had to shut down for this reason.

One way to get out in front of the issue of drug use and vandalism in public restrooms is to have far greater infrastructure for supporting people experiencing homelessness than we currently do, as well as safe injection sites. Because we haven’t just eliminated public bathrooms for working folks — we’ve fully eliminated private spaces for people experiencing homelessness. The only places where they or someone with opioid use disorder can expect a reasonable amount of privacy are public restrooms. There is a reason they congregate at McDonald’s: Because it’s a warm place where you can sit down for the price of a cup of coffee.

In order to get public bathrooms back, we have to be willing to create more space for those who are suffering.

On a practical level: There is no reason not to restart Philadelphia’s once-vaunted public bathhouse program. Obviously, these don’t have to be art deco or neoclassical masterworks (although that would be nice), but they could be supervised facilities with attendants where patrons could use their SEPTA cards for access.

They could be supervised facilities with attendants where patrons could use their SEPTA cards for access.

A pilot program with a few around the Center City area, I’m sure, would be a smash hit. And although it’s unlikely to go off without a hitch, it would be a far sight better than what we have now.

We’re on the right track at the moment — the city is set to install its first Portland Loo, a popular prefab public bathroom, on 15th and Arch sometime in 2023. Demand for the graffiti-resistant, easy-to-clean, and grated public toilets is so high that the company is literally having difficulty producing them quickly enough.

We’re expected to expect less in the 21st century. Services are becoming rarer, less usable, and more opaque. But the end of public restrooms is a line we can’t afford to cross. It represents the notion that the average pedestrian doesn’t even deserve the most meager, most basic, most intimate of services. A city without a place to use the bathroom is not livable, and as we try to build a more equitable, thoughtful future, planning for bathrooms should be front and center.

Quinn O’Callaghan is a writer in Philadelphia. quinnocallaghan91@gmail.com