JOEL ROSE, HOST:
A couple weeks ago, I was in Philadelphia, and I really needed to use the bathroom. Turns out, that is not as easy as it sounds.
SERAH GRANT: Desperate times call for desperate measures. The other day, I was over here, and I had to pee, and it's horrible. You got to go to a restaurant or something like that, and they'd be two, three blocks away. And sometimes, if you're here at night, everything is closed, then what are you going to do?
ROSE: That is Serah Grant. I spoke to her during my search in Rittenhouse Square, this beautiful urban park in Philadelphia. Around us - big shade trees, lots of benches, a working water fountain and no bathroom.
AVERY KALAC: I would love for there to be more public bathrooms 'cause, like, I know how my body is, and, like, that's just - like, if you got to go, you got to go. So if I got to buy a water, what - coffee, whatever the hell, like, that's fine. I'll do that.
TJ BROWN: They're usually disgusting, to be honest.
KALAC: Yeah.
BROWN: I'll even just go buy a drink if I need to, just to use a restroom.
KALAC: Bathroom, yeah.
BROWN: Yeah.
ROSE: Avery Kalac and T.J. Brown - also thwarted in their efforts to go find a place to go. And this is a problem across the city, says Olivia Hoffman.
OLIVIA HOFFMAN: I mean, I have boughten a piece of pizza for a bathroom multiple times that I threw in the trash.
ROSE: You bought a slice of pizza, used the bathroom and then threw the pizza away?
HOFFMAN: I had a couple of bites, but yeah.
ROSE: This is not just a Philadelphia problem. In cities all over the U.S., working public bathrooms are scarce. So why is it so hard to find something that literally everyone needs? Historian Bryant Simon has been thinking a lot about that. He is a professor at Temple University and the author of the new book "For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms And The Making Of American Inequality."
Why is it so hard to find a working public bathroom in this country?
BRYANT SIMON: The first thing - if we're thinking about public bathrooms, what we have to understand is that we actually spent a lot of money and a lot of energy building public bathrooms in the early part of the 20th century. So I think - we have to reframe the question is - why did we tear down what we already had?
And the answer, I would say, is in pursuit of inequality. We were troubled by the people who showed up at public bathroom doors, the people who needed private space in public, that we slowly - over the course of the 20th century - closed these facilities to keep some people away. And what we're left with is the end result of that pursuit of inequality, which is the rough equality of now, where nobody has a public bathroom.
ROSE: What happened? Like, how did all that start to fall apart?
SIMON: Yeah. What public bathrooms were was, in a sense, a kind of a attempt to build privacy in public. And the one form of privacy that almost immediately happened and really drove policymakers crazy was men interested in sex with men, often from working-class backgrounds, met in public bathrooms to have sex. And this happens almost immediately, and the response happens almost immediately. And what policymakers do is something we would find out later in the 20th century. They'd first try and arrest their way out of this problem by forming vice squads and men who posed as interested in sex with other men.
But, I mean, again, as we would learn later in the 20th century, it's hard to arrest your way out of a problem. And eventually, they come up with kind of the most radical and, in some ways, violent solution, in some ways, is to close public bathrooms. But then everybody sort of has to deal with the consequences of that.
ROSE: You write in the book that policing which bodies belong in which bathrooms has been around pretty much as long as public bathrooms have existed.
SIMON: This example - right? - of policing queer sex in bathrooms becomes almost a template. So this happens immediately as segregation breaks down, and policymakers, North and South, who don't want integrated bathrooms - what do they do? They close those bathrooms. In the 1980s, as homelessness becomes more pronounced and visible, the response of policymakers is to close public bathrooms in the hopes that the unhoused will somehow miraculously go away. And this becomes the - kind of one of the ways that bathroom governance, if you will, operates through the 20th century. Not just a reflection of inequality, it becomes a way to make inequality.
ROSE: In the second half of the 20th century, cities, you describe in your book, largely outsourced this issue of public bathrooms to the private sector. And in some cases, they were pretty clear that that's what they were doing, right?
SIMON: Yeah.
ROSE: They weren't even hiding it.
SIMON: No. And kind of some forgotten examples - Downy, California, and Chicago try and force gas stations to keep their bathrooms open in order to get local license outsourcing, right?
ROSE: There are some cities - and you talk about a few on the West coast - but there are cities that have tried to revive the public bathroom. How have those efforts gone?
SIMON: They have gone in complicated ways, and the solutions have been complicated. San Francisco is an interesting one - right? - where San Francisco has really earnestly tried to put some money at this problem because they were really suffering from a public problem of public defecation, right? And the building of public bathrooms there have made streets less onerous, have made them smell better. And again, I think that, you know, it's going to take some patience here, but I think the other side of this is, to do nothing - we know what that looks like. Bodies are still there, and bodies still do the things they do, whether we want them to or not.
ROSE: Out of all the pressing infrastructure issues that are facing our cities, why focus on this one? Why focus on public restrooms as opposed to, you know, say, drug addiction or housing? Like, why is this the issue?
SIMON: I mean, I don't think it can be an either-or question, but I think what a focus on public bathrooms can do is a couple things. One is, it can do what they always did. It can tell people that you care about them. It can be a way of saying that you matter, and that can leverage the ability to do more things.
ROSE: Bryant Simon is a historian and the author of the book "For Customers Only." Thank you very much for your time.
SIMON: Thanks so much for coming to Temple.
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