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Overview
This book is Number One in addressing the politics of where we're allowed to "go" in public.
Adults don't talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: the world of public bathrooms is problem- and politics-free. No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs reveals the opposite is true. No Place To Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place To Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways - momentous and mockable - public bathrooms just don't work. Like, for the homeless, who, faced with no place to go sometimes literally take to the streets. (Ever heard of a municipal poop map?) For people with invisible disabilities, such as Crohn's disease, who stay home rather than risk soiling themselves on public transit routes. For girls who quit sports teams because they don't want to run to the edge of the pitch to pee. Celebrities like Lady Gaga and Bruce Springsteen have protested bathroom bills that will stomp on the rights of transpeople. And where was Hillary Clinton after she arrived back to the stage late after the first commercial break of the live-televised Democratic leadership debate in December 2015? Stuck in a queue for the women's bathroom. Peel back the layers on public bathrooms and it's clear many more people want for good access than have it. Public bathroom access is about cities, society, design, movement, and equity. The real question is: Why are public toilets so crappy?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770565616 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Coach House Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 220 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Lezlie Lowe is a freelance journalist and journalism instructor. She has been recognized for her long-form journalism by the Canadian Association of Journalists and the Atlantic Journalism Awards. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of King's College, where she also teaches in the Journalism department. No Place To Go: How Public Toilets Fail our Private Needs is her first book. She currently lives in Halifax.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
GAME OF THRONES
Spring, 2005. I abandon my kids and trundle down the grimy concrete stairs to the public bathrooms in the bunker-like Pavilion on the Halifax Common. Practically every day – summer, fall, spring, and winter – I yank on the heavy door, more surprised when it budges than when it doesn't. Getting in is only something of an advantage. These public bathrooms are smelly and soap-free. There's no changing table, often no paper towels, and the hand dryers have been smashed off the walls. I turn around and climb the stairs to retrieve my girls. To use these city-run facilities, I leave my double stroller and the rest of my belongings outside, crossing my fingers that nothing gets stolen while I help a toddler down the stairs, balancing an infant and lugging a diaper bag.
I brave it. My bladder's weak; always has been. It's not a medical condition. It's just that, when I have to go, I really have to go. What's more, my feeble ability to hold it far exceeds my toilet-training three-year-old's, so daily down the stairs I tromp to give that handle a yank. Most days, it's no go, which means a quick turnaround to head home to pee or change someone's pants. I'll learn later that the softball league that uses the diamonds on weekends has copies of the keys; they turn the deadbolts when they leave on Sunday evenings, lest up-to-no-good mothers like me get in and mess up the place.
I'm on the Common because it's close to my home; a convenient place to go to get the heck out of the house. Being free of four walls with young kids is a prophylactic against maternal madness, and the Halifax Common is a central park on downtown's edge with plenty of grass and trees, and paths for strolling. The Common was set aside in 1749 as a community livestock pasture (the irony here is inescapable – this place was, at one time, a giant bathroom). Having banished sheep and cows, the modern Common's twelve hectares hold tennis courts, ball diamonds, a skate park, a swimming pool, and a splash pad. The place is built for leisure. Unless, that is, you're the kind of person who uses the bathroom.
Every time I'm out with my infant and toddler, I need to change a diaper or respond to the urinary urgency of my toileter-to-be. Often both. Every time. Parents reading this know it to be true. So it's inconceivable – though here I am living it – that no municipal workers seem to check that the Common bathrooms are open, let alone clean and stocked. This is simply what passes for a public toilet in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2005. And, look, that's no slag on my home city. Halifax is a provincial capital and regional centre with six universities, active arts and sports scenes, and access to the unbounded wild within a thirty-minute drive of downtown. In short: we take quality of life seriously. This same kind of sad-excuse-for-a-public-toilet is what passes in cities and parks all over North America even today.
And this, precisely, is the problem.
It's the reason I carry little girls' underwear in my purse. It's the reason I've developed toilet radar; the reason the first thing I look for in a new environment is the closest place to pee. It's the reason I started to ask questions about public toilets. Like, why aren't there more of them, in a developed country with enough money to fund polar and space exploration and to give generous tax breaks to multinational corporations? And how is it that with kids, I started having so much trouble navigating a city that I used to steer through problem-free? People tell you your life changes once you become a parent. And it's true: I sure started seeing public bathrooms differently.
Or, you might say I started seeing them at all. And once I began to think about toilets, I couldn't stop. The more I learned, the more it struck me that the history of public toilets in cities is the history of cities themselves. Toilets have been a central, recurring theme in my journalism practice ever since I wrote my very first piece as a staff writer for Halifax's alternative weekly paper, The Coast (that's when I found out that the softball leagues were the ones locking me out). Public bathrooms are invariably one of the highlights (or lowlights) of my travels. My holiday pics are flooded with public bathroom shots; I reach excitedly for my Twitter feed when I find a great bathroom sign, like the ones at Edinburgh's Meadows park, which include distances along with way-finding. Public bathrooms, so seemingly mundane, keep me up at night. They spell out how unwillingly we share public space, how we would rather pretend we never defecate or urinate (or, for that matter, menstruate). Public bathrooms are private spaces that reveal public truths. I can't help myself. I have to peek inside.
My bathroom fiascos on the Halifax Common aren't just my stories; they are the province of parents all over. For most North American kids, the leap out of diapers happens around age three. Toilet training is a time of frayed nerves, when leaving the house goes high-stakes. Kids – non-parents may be unaware, here – give little warning of impending sanitary disaster. It can be zero to puddle in under sixty. And in the miraculous case that a new underpantser is aware enough to give the gotta-go in time, a most pressing question indeed presents itself: where?
I call Andreae Callanan, a friend of a friend in St. John's, Newfoundland. I want the perspective of a parent in a different city, and one with higher stakes. Callanan has four kids. She knows this game of thrones. 'I can't even think of how many times my children have had to pee in an alleyway or behind a bush, or a mailbox,' she says. 'You do these things because you have to.' This isn't dinner party conversation. No parent wants to explain that his kid pooped on the playground slide, or describe how he cleaned it up with a McChicken container fished out of the trash. Callanan tells me she once changed a soiled diaper in an outhouse-sized café bathroom in Montréal, aiming a soggy child into a clean diaper balanced on her lap as the then-new mom sat on a toilet. The Filipino nanny of one of my friends is horrified at the lack of public bathrooms in parks in her adopted city of Ottawa. She's taught her three-year-old charge to pee on the back of the electrical box at one of the parks. 'I wasn't sure if that was an attempt at privacy,' my friend confides, 'or a passive 'fuck you' to the Parks and Rec department.'
Employing the electrical-box fix or not, parents and caregivers of children, especially those in the throes of toilet training, must develop an expertly tuned bathroom homing device. For Callanan, downtown St. John's presents an Ancient Mariner-calibre conundrum – bathrooms, bathrooms everywhere, but not a place to pee. Think about it: every commercial building has a bathroom. Every café and store, and restaurant. Ditto for office towers and government buildings, which Callanan eyes directly. 'These are companies with gazillions of dollars. They already have staff to keep the building clean, and they can't have this little bit of generosity to open up two clean rooms? It just seems so stingy.' It's not that simple, of course. Provision costs. There's add-on water and paper, and hydro. Extra cleaning. Perhaps more significantly, providing bathrooms means welcoming the world and being okay with it. There's an element of people – homeless or street people, drug dealers or drug users, those cruising for sex or looking for a place to nap – that businesses usually want to keep out; and that goes even if those folks only want to come in to actually use the bathroom. Keeping some out is easiest achieved by keeping everyone out.
Callanan goes to the park with her kids regularly from about March through December. But almost all St. John's park bathrooms – there are about fourteen across the metropolitan area to serve 200,000 people – are open Victoria Day through Labour Day. After that, parks staffing is cut back because kids are in school, days are getting shorter, and temperatures are dipping. 'We generally only have walkers then,' says St. John's deputy city manager Paul Mackey when I speak to him in the fall of 2014. 'Not so much activity.' So for Callanan (and presumably all those lonely walkers), it's the bushes.
The St. John's Parks and Open Spaces Master Plan was presented to city council in late 2014. The plan was the result of scads of public meetings, but the records of the consultation include no mention bathrooms whatsoever. Mackey tells me toilets weren't part of the discussion because that would have been going into too high a level of detail. But, he says, the city has heard an earful from walkers on the Grand Concourse portion of the Newfoundland T'Railway, who wonder where they're supposed to find relief along the pathway's nearly two hundred kilometres. The Grand Concourse was designed to encourage active transportation and links St. John's with eight-and-counting bedroom communities. Mackey says it's well used. 'In the winter, people are still walking.' (Mackey, himself, may now have joined them; he retired in 2015.) Some others, like Callanan, are out playing in the snow with their kids. Contrary to the point of urban parks, sometimes she opts for the mall when she needs to get everybody out of the house. It's a 'much less stimulating but accessible environment,' she says. She would rather spend her money downtown, but at times the burden of being on bathroom red alert is too tiring.
It's easy to pretend public bathrooms don't need any fixing when no one talks reasonably about their problems. Toilet talk boomerangs between clinical and bust-a-gut. We can spill to our doctors about our toilet habits. (Well, some of us, anyway.) We can toss out potty jokes. But we don't have the language to deal with the everyday. Your kid had to squat behind a shrub and wipe with purse-bottom-mottled Kleenex? You shit your pants in line at Starbucks because you had to buy something to get a bathroom key? La-la-la ... I can't hear you ... Meanwhile, targeted ads follow us around the internet pushing plush toilet paper and wet wipes. The glossy mags I browse at my local magazine store paint clean scenes of fluffy towels and svelte toilets looking more like hatboxes than your average commode. It's not difficult to see where the bathroom sexiness line is drawn. Toilet advertising is all about improving the private bathroom experience selling luxury, cost-saving eco-friendliness, or hyper-cool design. It's not about bettering public conveniences and simple access. After all, what's there to sell in a public bathroom? There's no commerce in social justice and public health.
Plus, on a global scale, we've got it good. Here's a truth bomb, care of the World Health Organization (who) and United Nations Children's Fund (unicef): 2.3 billion people live without basic sanitation – roughly equivalent to the populations of Africa, North America, and South East Asia combined. That count is from the 2017 sustainable development goals progress report on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene. And, while the report acknowledges that things are getting better, the goal of universal basic sanitation by 2030 will not be met at the current rate of improvement.
One solution, such as it is, for lack of basic sanitation is open defecation, which I'm sorry to say is exactly what you're likely picturing – people shitting in fields and on streets. Open defecation is a daily reality for 892 million people, most of them in Central and Southern Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Inadequate sanitation and open defecation spread disease – intestinal worms, schistosomiasis, and trachoma, for starters – and causes diarrhea, which is directly responsible for the deaths of 280,000 people a year, according to the who and unicef. Add in the related woes of inadequate water and hygiene and the number of annual deaths shoots to 842,000. Almost half are children under five.
Take a second to sit with that. Almost half the deaths are of infants and toddlers. When a child in Halifax gets diarrhea, she goes to bed, rests up, and maybe munches some pediatric electrolyte freeze-pops. In too many nations, diarrhea, added to a lack of easy access to clean drinking water and a lack of soap and a place for hand washing, mows down 361,000 little kids a year, plus another 480,000-odd adults. These are staggering numbers, and ones, perhaps, easy to dismiss as you fill a water bottle at your kitchen sink. But know this: open defecation happens in major North American cities, too. When homeless people look too shabby to be welcome in cafés and malls, when they're unsheltered and sleeping rough, when they don't have a free on-street bathroom to visit, or enough spare change to pump into one of the Automatic Public Toilets (apts) spouting like mushrooms in some North American cities, they have to go somewhere. The average person goes to the bathroom six to eight times a day. You do the math.
Spring, 2014. The never-open Pavilion public bathrooms of my kids' childhoods are now caged with chain-link and permanently padlocked. Those dank concrete stairs I used to clunk down collect desiccated leaves and McDonald's coffee cups. The city will open them for special events if organizers put in a request, but I can't fathom they're used much. Halifax's supervisor of contract services, John Cook, takes me in to show me around. The bathrooms are ghostly and dark, and notably cleaner than I've ever seen them. The chipped plywood stalls have been replaced with plastic laminate separators, the broken mirrors removed. Still, no strollers or wheelchairs can get in, and even for the able-bodied who can get down the stairs, there's something eerie about this windowless, subterranean space. It feels, from the perspective of a woman, too easy to be trapped, too difficult to be heard. Most people probably make the five-minute walk to the new public washrooms on the other side of the Common, even when these are open.
The new bathrooms were built in 2007 in response to the community clamouring for better provision. Business owners were fed up with people asking to use their customer washrooms because the Pavilion toilets were dirty, scary, or locked. A nearby Royal Canadian Legion reported to the city that, on average, three hundred people a day were coming through the door to relieve themselves. The new Common bathrooms are large, accessible and, crucially, more vandalism-proof than the Pavilion, which was racking up somewhere in the range of $30,000 for annual fix-ups, graffiti removal, and repainting. But vandal-proofing comes at a different cost. At the new Common bathrooms, there are no mirrors at the sinks and no paper towels. The taps, flushers, and hand dryers are automatic. This provokes uneasy, perhaps unanswerable, questions: What makes a good public bathroom? Can durability go too far? I appreciate the new Common bathrooms, I do. But, jeez, there aren't even toilet seats. You just perch on a cold stainless steel rim.
I get it – unbreakability is a virtue. These are public bucks and taxpayers are tight-fisted hands at the grindstone. But the new Common bathrooms don't necessarily address user needs. They're open only 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., which sticks early-morning exercisers or anyone walking across the Common late at night (it's a popular route from downtown bars to Halifax's west-end and university neighbourhoods) back in the bushes. Plus, when the city built this brick shithouse, it didn't winterize it. The bathrooms are closed November 1 through May 1, recalling downtown St. John's – though there, according to Paul Mackey, most of the bathrooms are winterized; it's just that there's little winter demand. In Halifax, it's a perplexingly opposite situation – great demand and no ability to open the bathrooms. The Halifax Common has become a winter hotspot, especially since the addition of a four-hundred-metre speed-skating oval in 2010. The oval sees more than 120,000 skaters through December, January, February, and March. Within a year of its opening, city installed a brick plaza, a special events stage, a warming trailer, and a massive piece of public art. As far as bathrooms? The city brought in a row of porta-potties. There are no signs on the Common, or the surrounding area, to light the way for toilet seekers. Unless you know where you're going, you're not going at all. Stand in the middle of the Common and punch 'public washroom' into Google Maps and all you get is a single hit: a bathroom on the waterfront that's a twenty-one-minute walk away.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "No Place To Go"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Lezlie Lowe.
Excerpted by permission of COACH HOUSE BOOKS.
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