As early as 1838, the question of public sanitation facilities was an issue in political discourse both in New York City and across the United States. Members of the public called for public baths in Milwaukee, New York, and Philadelphia, and some private charitable groups, such as the People’s Bathing and Washing Association in New York City, attempted to open baths in cooperation with municipal governments. Gradually, city agencies took on the task. By 1869, the Metropolitan Board of Health, a newly formed agency in New York, constructed the first public bathroom at Astor Place in Manhattan and, by 1880, operated twenty-two public urinals.
Even though women were deeply involved in the push to have them constructed, women’s stalls were largely left out of these public projects. Private facilities such as department stores, train stations, and libraries took notice and constructed ornate separate spaces for middle-class women, complete with draperies, couches for napping, desks for letter-writing, and most important, private bathroom stalls.
Accommodations for working-class women were more basic. In 1887, in order to curb sexual harassment at work, New York amended its factory law to require separate bathrooms specifically for women. Mass transit companies that served the working class offered bathrooms with less esteem than their luxury railway counterparts. Small, poorly attended bathrooms were installed at subway and elevated line stops across New York City, with eight hundred in Manhattan alone in 1919.
In 1897, following a scathing report by the Committee on Public Bath, Water Closets, and Urinals convened by Mayor William L. Strong calling the lack of public bathrooms “a disgrace to the city and to the civilization of the nineteenth century,” the city constructed its first comfort station and gradually expanded its stock, totaling eight in Manhattan and six in Brooklyn by 1905. This trend took off around the United States. By 1919, nearly one hundred cities, including Detroit, Toledo, Cleveland, Chicago, Madison, Milwaukee, and Schenectady, offered comfort stations, placing them in prominent places to serve people from all walks of life.
As author Frederic C. Howe explained in his 1905 reform tract The City: The Hope of Democracy, “Cities are constantly adding to their burdens and rapidly enlarging their functions in response to the needs of the public and the dangers of unrestrained individualism.” Public ownership of bathrooms was not seen as an overreach but the duty of the government to provide for public welfare.