Thanks to a combination of the impact of public health and social reform campaigns and improvements in urban infrastructure, the first years of the 20th century saw a proliferation of public toilets. “There was a big surge of construction [of public restrooms] in the 1900s and 1910s, because there was concern that when Prohibition came in, it was going to close down the go-to public restrooms,” says U Conn’s Baldwin.
The more elaborate examples of these “comfort stations” were sited underground. Following London’s lead, New York City opened its first subterranean restroom in 1897, and Boston’s debuted a year later. Other larger cities — like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle and Washington, D.C. — followed suit, building their own underground comfort stations in the 1900s and 1910s. Most were designed with high ceilings and covered with gleaming white tile, to instill confidence in their sanitation standards (and counterbalance the discomfort that might arise from descending below street-level for the purpose of relieving yourself).
Privacy, at a price
A final boom in public bathroom construction lasted from roughly 1918 to 1921, a period that coincided with the Great Influenza pandemic and the end of World War I. But then the push for public toilets stalled out.
After the 18th Amendment took effect in January 1920, those who campaigned for public restrooms as a way to keep people out of bars had achieved their goal. And they weren’t the only ones to run out of steam. “The 1910s were still part of the Progressive Era, and there was high prestige for what the government could do,” Baldwin says. “But by the 1920s, there was a sense of exhaustion.”
The often-ornate architectural features of public comfort stations made these facilities costly to build and maintain. Plus, the women who originally campaigned for these spaces had since moved on to a different type of public restroom. Upper- and middle-class white women gradually gained access to hotels, theaters, train stations, and, most notably, department stores. These privately owned establishments offered a far more enticing option — “public” restrooms designed to mimic the design and comforts of home, with lounges full of sofas and vanities for freshening up.
But out of all the amenities this new class of restrooms provided, few had the appeal of their exclusivity. These weren’t pay toilets, per se, but the expectation was that the people using them had purchased tickets to a play or a railway journey, or beverages while socializing in a hotel, or spent the afternoon shopping in a department store. The latter, Baldwin says, were the most accessible to customers of varying classes. So, in an effort to keep well-heeled patrons of high-end retail establishments content, “bargain basements” opened on lower levels — giving less-affluent women a place both to shop and use the facilities without mingling with wealthier clientele.
This line of thinking — a contributing factor to the decline of public restrooms — involved a shift from believing that the government should be responsible for providing bodily privacy, toward what Baldwin calls a consumer model of privacy. “If the individual wants to purchase privacy, you go right ahead,” he says. “You go to that restaurant, and you buy your coffee so you can use the bathroom. But [providing bodily privacy] is not the responsibility of the taxpayers. And that seemed to be America’s choice.”