A handful of these fine things are scattered around the downtown San Jose. They’re in other cities like San Francisco and Paris, and in San Jose it costs 25c to go. The low cost may still be prohibitive as I’ve already accidentally walked through a river of pee coming from a man hiding in a storefront one night as I was walking along — we made eye contact, and at least one of us wished we weren’t there.
Public toilets are good, and discourage this sort of behavior mostly. Toronto used to have them all over — some are still buried underneath the Spadina-Queen intersection. Rumour has it one of the reasons why Toronto got rid of them is because men were cottaging (you can read reports of Toronto Police entrapping old fashioned George Michael’s in the Allan Gardens toilets in the 20s-30s) in the days before Trudeau. These green units would probably offer more privacy for sex, but the door opens automatically after 20 minutes so people would have to be quick and unromantic.
It’s like the space toilet in 2001, complete with Kubrick-like instructions on the outside . The door closes automatically behind you, you don’t have to touch anything in order to wash your hands and I think if you want to sit down some kind of paper covering device comes out, but even so I couldn’t think of anything more horrible to try (it’s good to be a boy, sometimes).
When you’re finished, you can kick a big square button near the floor to open the door, so you really don’t have to touch anything but yourself, and maybe some people don’t even have to do that. It might be good if some of these were in Toronto, though they take up a fair chunk of space. There is room for two ads, and both on this one were of the public service sort.
Still, it’s a bit strange being in this little vessel, knowing you’re surrounded by people in public. Though there were no windows, it reminded me of that art installation called “Don’t Miss A Sec” by Monica Bonvicini, where a public toilet was constructed out of two-way mirrors outside the Tate in London — you could see out, but nobody could see you do your thing. Not for the pee-shy certainly.
When the door opens, the entire bathroom is exposed, and the toilet flushes automatically. I’m not sure this part is good. This isn’t Europe — it’s good to have some healthy shame about this sort of thing — so placing these things off to the side would make people more comfortable, and let them exit relieved and unnoticed. It’s interesting though that they’re still called “Toilet” here in San Jose — Americans usually like the euphemism “Restroom”. Until Toronto gets something like this, we can contribute to Washroom Quest, and share information on kind-of public washrooms.
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That’s an interesting design for a public toilet — a bit old-fashioned with deep, rich colours. A little chunky and plastic-looking, but I like the idea. In Toronto, I would have expected something shinier, more sterile, and more matte silver — predictable.
The wide open look is probably due to the toilet being wheelchair accessible. In New York some time ago there was a plan to put similar public toilet modules on the street, but the plan was nixed because of the extra expense of making them accessible.
There have been a lot of those toilets with one way mirrors in the last few years, I remember one in a brewery above the urinals so you could look out over the brewing operations while you considered the cycle of life. There is a cafe in Brighton, England where I used to live that has a mirror along one wall, behind which is the bathroom. You can see through the mirror while you sit on the toilet, watching people eat….
There’s a blog post with pics of one in Zurich here, http://easteatswest.typepad.com/east_eats_west/2006/07/triathlon_a_gru.html
Well, public toilets are a part of the RFP that’s about to go out to provide Toronto with “coordinated” (i.e. privatized) street furniture. At the May Council meeting, Stintz and De Baeremaeker went tà ªte-à  -tà ªte on the matter.
Excerpted from my notes:
STINTZ: “Five years from now, we might have benches with no ads, and public toilets. What if the toilets need to be fixed? We need more money for more service, but we can’t get rid of the toilets because we need the ad revenue and can’t put ads on benches. We’ll have to lock the toilets, and then we’ll have billboards posing as toilets.”
DE BAEREMAEKER: “I love toilets! Perhaps Councillor Stintz doesn’t have the same needs as I have. When I’m biking by Dundas Square and need to go to the washroom, I don’t have anywhere to go. Thank god for Pizza Pizza. When in public space, when you got to go, you got to go.”
STINTZ, rising on a point of personal privilege: “I never said I didn’t like toilets. I like toilets.”
According to Mike Smith in Now, De Baeremaeker also at that meeting said, “I love public toilets. And if there’s one thing I love more than toilets, it’s advertising.”
I like public toilets too. There are some nice 1950s ones in Vancouver, and of course, London UK has great underground ones with an attendant.
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Accessability is good, so’s the wide open. Mabe just a hedge or something in front of the door.
Here in South Korea most restaurants don’t have washrooms. Instead, people use toilets that are shared throughout the building. Most buildings in shopping/restaurant/bar areas have shops and restaurants and bars piled on top of each other on mulitple floors and the washrooms are scattered throughout. They’re not really public washrooms, I suppose. The businesses likely all contribute to their upkeep. They’re not all that nice either. But they do come in handy when you’re walking about. If you gotta go, you just walk down some random hallway that connects restaurants and stores and you’ll find signs for a washroom somewhere. You kinda have to carry around your own toilet paper, though. The washrooms often don’t provide it, and if they do, it’s not available in the stalls.
Here’s the problem with public loos, people are ****ing slobs. I work in a nice office building with people who are all highly educated and apprently well socialized and some percentage of them can’t be convinced to flush and not just throw their paper towels on the floor. Remove the social pressure of having to work every day with your fellow loo users and well, you get the picture.
Personally I’ve not seen an automated solution that works, the Parisian ones “clean” the bowl with a rotating brush that has the effect of macerating the contents and depositing them in a nice even layer on the whole working surface.