When You Gotta Go, Get Out Of Town
This morning DCist Ryan found a story in the New York Times about the lack of public restrooms in Gotham City. DCist Michael said he'd recently observed a tourist relieving himself in Washington Circle, and theorized that this might also be a problem in our nation's capital.
I then asked if I could come forward and tell a story I had never told anyone. Way back in the twentieth century, as a high school kid growing up in the Virginia suburbs, I rode down with my friends to walk around the Mall and see the monuments all lit up at night, like they are in all the postcards.
On the way downtown, someone cracked open a twelve-pack of cokes, and I gratefully chugged first one and then another, and even a third. When we got downtown, I was thrilled by the sights, and everything looked better with my caffeine buzz, but I really just wanted to find a bathroom. With a trusted friend in a similar predicament, I wandered off to find the nearest one.
We tried the doors at the museums and memorials. We tried doors at government buildings and restaurants. Everything was closed. There was no comfort facility anywhere. After a half hour of knocking and running, which is hard with crossed legs, we decided to use--and I'd like to point out here that we acted in no connection with DCist, which did not even exist at the time--the closest facsimile of appropriate and familiar conditions we could find: the Reflecting Pool.
Photograph of empty Reflecting Pool before tourist season by Flickr user davebushe.
The bank of the Pool was suitably dark and sheltered from the quiet night streets by thoughtful privacy hedges. The ducks swimming peacefully by gave an added sense of comfort and luxury. We were only disappointed by the lack of modern hand washing facilities. We overcame this by tearing some grass off the Mall and rubbing it between our hands. This would have felt even more sanitary if we could have been sure that a stranger in a similar situation hadn't recently assigned opposite meanings to the same two spaces.
In later years of wandering D.C. at night, I became adept at walking calmly into hotel lobbies to use restrooms. Nothing beats the Four Seasons, but every place has its charms. However, the city is always full of tourists and other transient persons. The thought of what everyone does to that mall is enough to make one hesitate to march there, let alone lay down on the grass for a free concert.
The Times lists Sydney, Australia as the nearest place where public bathrooms are available, modern and clearly marked. We would like to point out that here, in America, there is a city that puts even Australia to shame. Los Angeles has free public restrooms and even free public showers on its free public beaches.
Clearly everyone in Los Angeles is high. The water, alone, must cost the city hundreds of dollars per day. That's like each resident paying up to a dollar a year out of their taxes just to avoid catching hepatitis from a tourist who stinks of urine. Obviously it's better to be surrounded by a small stream of human waste than a giant river of government waste like that.
Worse yet, with the water fountains attached to these facilities, LA is only encouraging more joggers and bikers to leave their gyms and exercise in their city streets. D.C. already has enough trouble with these dangerous hazards to pedestrian traffic, thank you. That's why we limit our bikers to those strong enough to carry their water, so to speak.
Of course, D.C. also has built hundreds of public restrooms at costs of untold millions of dollars, and we plan to some day build even more. We just have higher standards for where we will put such an important facility. It has to be in the stadium of a losing team.
Sadly, even stadiums can't help the average bar crawler. After last call, those who have broken the seal are always going to be challenged by those long metro waits, and the stadiums tend to close before the bars. This means that the last train to the suburbs is full of knees tightly pressed together, fists clenched on laps and chins tucked in determination. We've even seen one tipsy young lady hold onto the handrail, hitch up her skirt, laugh wryly and let fly right in the middle of the car.
Here we'd like to take an editorial position in favor of keeping those absorbent yellow carpets on the floors of our trains. We'd also like to take a stand against adding any more public restrooms to the Metro system and against marking the few that exist on Metro maps. We especially hope that Metro won't start running trains later, which would allow pretty drunk girls to ride to a restroom, find relief, and still be sure they could ride safely home. A show that hot deserves an encore.
Photograph of full Reflecting Pool, late in tourist season by Flickr user Angel's Lens.