User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in the United States

Public toilets in the United States
A urinal at a bar in Portland, Oregon
Language of toilets
Local words	restrooms bathrooms cans johns comfort stations
Men's toilets	Men gents stallions
Women's toilets	Women ladies fillies
Public toilet statistics
Toilets per 100,000 people	8 (2021)
Total toilets	??
Public toilet use
Type	Western style sit toilet
Locations	restaurants bars retail locations
Average cost	???
Often equipped with	???
Percent accessible	???
Date first modern public toilets	???
.

Public toilets in the United States are found at a rate or around eight per 100,000 people. There are a number of laws governing where and how public toilets should function. A number of have won international awards. Despite improvements in public sanitation, some people still lack toilet access in the United States.

Early toilet innovations included toilet paper and the flush toilet, though these weren't used until relatively late in the United States. Problems with smells and public health led to the first major efforts to install public toilets around the country. The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission played a role in the 1900s in building public toilets in the South to fight things like tape worm. The Works Progress Administration continued this type of work during the 1930s. Public toilets began to be pay toilets, before they were removed as part of efforts to end sexist public bathroom policies. Many public toilets were closed in the early 2000s as part of security measures following the 9/11 terrorist attack. The covid-19 pandemic led to renewed awareness over the problems caused by the lack of public toilets.

When public toilets began to appear, laws regarding sex segregation of public toilets also began to appear. By the 2000s, this topic have become controversial and contentious, especially as it related to transgender access to public toilets. Incarcerated women have faced issues with access not just to menstrual products, but also to prison toilet facilities in which to change them.

Public toilets

A 2021 study found there were eight public toilets per 100,000 people. This put the United States on par with Botswana and behind world leading Iceland, who had 56 public toilets per 100,000 residents.

The most common type of toilet in public toilets in the United States is a flush toilet. Public toilets in the United States are generally clean, or as clean as the streets and local water that surround them. Self-cleaning public toilets use a lot of water, four times as much as non-self-cleaning toilets. Privately owned toilets in cafes and fast food eateries are the most common alternatives to government owned public toilets.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has guidance that requires employers to provide adequate toilet facilities for their employees. A number of states have passed laws that require business to provide members of the public with conditions like Crohn’s and colitis access to employee only toilets. In parts of the United States, public defecation or public urination can result in a person ending up on sex offender registry.  This varies greatly from state to state though, with New York not including this offense as a sexual one.

There has historically been a lack of parity in the number of men's public toilet compared to women's public toilets. Organizations like American Restroom Association (ARA) have worked to try to address this gap.

Around 1 million people in the United States lacked access to basic sanitation and toilets in 2017. Most of the people in this group were poor people of color living in urban environments.

Toilets in the United States have won a number of international awards. The 2019 International Toilet Tourism Awards gave Hotel La Jolla in San Diego the award for best location. It gave Bowl Plaza in Kansas the award for quirkiest experience.

Language

Euphemisms are often used to avoid discussing the purpose of toilets.  Words used include toilet, restroom, bathroom, lavatory and john. washroom is one of the most commonly used words for public toilet in the United States.

Toilets are colloquially referred to as cans and johns. In the 1930s, public toilets for women were often called comfort stations. abdicate was 1970s era slang in San Francisco meaning, "to leave a public toilet following the arrival of the police."  Enthroned meant, "sitting on a public toilet and cruising for sexual partners." Since 1994, bio-break has meant taking a toilet break.  This word was introduced across the English speaking world as a result of the Internet.

Words that have been used to indicate men's toilets include gents and stallions, while words to indicate women's toilets have included ladies and fillies.

History

Despite toilet paper being used in parts of China starting in the mid-800s, paper was expensive to produce and considered valuable; this meant most places did not start using toilet paper until relatively late. In 1857, toilet paper was first sold in the United States.  At the time, it was sold by the sheet.  It was not until 1890 that toilet paper would be sold by the roll in the United States. Corncobs were used early in the United States to clean people's anus area after defecating.  This as especially common in more rural areas. Many people used newspapers for toilet paper in the early part of the 20th century.

Flush toilets were adopted later in the United States than in Europe, only becoming popular in the mid-1900s. The toilet plunger was likely invented by American Jeffrey Gunderson in 1932. Most sewage was untreated in the United States until the 1970s, with most of it being sent into nearby waterways like rivers and lakes.  This began to change in 1972.

Sanitation in the United States in the 1850s was comparable to London in the same period. 6% of the deaths in Chicago in 1854 were from cholera. The lack of public toilets caused a stink on the streets in major cities in the 1850s. A Chicago Tribune article in the 1850s said that human waste was so bad that the streets "are ankle deep in festering corruption and rottenness." The need to build infrastructure for both public and private toilets in Chicago in the late 1800s required that the city raise the level of the streets.

A group of New York City physicians recommended that public urinals be installed in 1865 in order to improve overall health in the city. The first plans to build public toilets in New York City by the New York Metropolitan Board of Health in the theater district were created in 1866. They initially planned to construct two but only ended up building one, located at Astor Place and 8th Street. Construction was finished in 1869. This public toilet was short lived. In 1872, the Department of Public Works removed it. By 1897, public toilers in New York City were being used by around 1,000 men on a daily basis.  The daily average of women using public toilets was around 25.  One of the reasons women did not use them is the facilities were small, and upper class women did not have room to maneuver and pee while wearing long, space taking dresses.  Women also avoided them because they were frequently very hot inside during the summer and freezing cold during the winter.  This was in part a result of of the cast-iron construction design.

A lot of tenement housing in the early 1900s lacks toilet provisions. The Progressive Era saw reformists make a major push to address public hygiene.  As part of this push, they sought to improve the toilet and sanitation in tenement housing in cities across the United States.

In the 1900s, a Progressive Era campaign  by municipalities, academics and socialists resulted in efforts in Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, Cleveland and Madison to replace saloons with comfort stations.

In the 1900s and 1910s, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Toledo, Worcester, Salt Lake City, Providence, Binghamton, Hartford, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Portland and the District of Columbia all built underground public toilets, most located in the city center in the local business district.  The prestige of building underground public comfort stations was so high that some towns and cities who were unable to afford underground public toilets opted for none instead.

Victorian ideals included the concept that a woman's place was in the home.  Consequently, few women's public toilets were built in order to try to encourage middle and upper class women to stay home. Starting in the 1920s, middle and upper-class women living in cities stopped using public toilets, and instead shifted to toilets in facilities like hotels, theaters, train stations and department stores.

Knowledge about disease transmission improved in the early 20th century, with governments beginning to understand that improved sanitary disposal prevented the spread of typhoid fever, diarrhea, dysentery, hookworm and other gastrointestinal problems. State governments began to try to control hookworm in the period between 1910 and 1913 by improving public sanitary facilities.

The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was founded in 1909 to combat hookworm disease in the South. A survey was done of 11 southern states, which confirmed the presence of hookworm in 700 countries.  A chief cause of spread of hookworm disease as open defecation in farmland.  The Rockefeller Sanitary Commission program helped install public toilets and promote their use as part of their efforts to reduce hookworm disease.  This was coupled with offering free exams and health treatment for hookworm disease.

The Great Influenza pandemic, which took place from around 1918 to 1921, helped push the need for the construction of more public toilets. After World War I ended, the volume of construction for new public toilets declined dramatically. Starting in the 1920s, Americans began to believe that it was not the responsibility of the government to provide people with a place to use the toilet.

Chicago teamsters often had difficulty finding public toilets in the 1910s, and as a result went to saloons where alcohol was served to use them.  As saloons were not free like public toilets, this culturally obligated the men to pay for a drink.  This sort of action played a two-fold role in Chicago and American society at the time.  First, it helped to drive a desire to build more public toilets.  Second, it helped fuel the prohibition movement. As the Prohibition effort began to take more shape in the 1910s, large cities in the Northeast and Midwest had women's groups advocating for the creation of large numbers of comfort stations as a way of discouraging men from entering drinking establishments in search of public toilets. This was successful in many places in getting cities to build comfort stations, but the volume of new public toilets built was rarely enough to meet public needs.

Because of changes in attitudes and the country going in a more conservative direction, starting in the 1920s, public health officials began to advocate less for public toilets and improved sanitation as this was seen as primarily helping the less affluent. At the same time, these same public health officials were also often advocating for less privacy in public toilets, seeing it as counterproductive in their battle try to fight and track sexually transmitted diseases, especially among poor people and people of color.  While maintaining privacy in public toilets had been a goal prior to that, it ceased to be by then.

The Works Progress Administration during the 1930s tried to increase access to public toilets across the United States.  Their focus though tended to be on building such facilities in national parks and other civic areas, not at improving access in urban environments. In the end, they constructed 2,911,323 outhouses, which they officially called sanitary privies.  Colloquially, they were referred to as Roosevelt rooms. The greatest number of these facilities were constructed in West Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Mississippi. One of the consequences of the large number of additional public toilet facilities in these states was the number of cases of typhoid fever dropped. While federal projects increased the number of public toilets in the 1930s, few were built in urban areas.

By the 1940s, many municipal governments in the United States found themselves in charge of running and maintaining local public transportation networks and the public toilet network that came with them.  These toilets had historically had maintenance issues, problems with vandalism and other issues.  To try to keep their budgets in check, many cities closed public toilets associated with their public transit networks.  They were assisted in doing this by affluent people being less willing to pay to use these facilities, especially as they increasingly had toilets in their homes.

Germ theory began to be better understood by the general population in the United States following World War II.  Cleanliness began to be viewed less as a moral issue and more as a public health issue.  This changed views on public toilets. As people moved to the suburbs following World War II, a new reliance on car began to develop, which led to the creation of the federal interstate system.  Along these routes, public toilet facilities also began to appear.  

There was a push back against public toilets in Jim Crow states, because it meant that local governments were not just required to build two toilets, one for men and one for women, but four toilets, one each for men and women who were white and who were colored. The Turner v. Randolph case in 1961 was about desegregation of public library toilets in Memphis.  The city argued against desegregation, saying that the prevalence of venereal diseases among black people would result in white women getting it.

The National Parks Service estimated in 1948 it needed a budget for physical improvements of $115,000,000.  This included, among other things, improvements for public toilets.

Most city operated public toilets in the 1950s and 1960s were pay toilets. The fee to access these toilets was around a nickel or a dime, with the money earned being invested back into toilet maintenance and upkeep. There were 50,000 coin-operated public toilets located across the United  States in 1970. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, public pay toilets were viewed by feminist activists as sexist because public urinals were free but public sit style toilets were not. The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, more commonly known as CEPTIA, tried to change this by getting municipals on public pay toilets.  Their first success was in Chicago in 1973.  This was then followed by municipal and state wide success in a strong of additional states including Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Wyoming. By 1980, coin-operated toilets had almost disappeared from the public landscape. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, public pay toilets were viewed by feminist activists as sexist because public urinals were free but public sit style toilets were not.

A Korean sanitary inspector went to the University of Oklahoma in 1957 for training in sanitary inspection in line with United States standards.  He was the first Korean to take part in the program. Topics related to this program included public wells, public toilets, night soil tanks and public baths.

When NASA was designing toilets for the space program, they had considered throwing solid waste out of the capsules.  In the end, they determined this would be diplomatically unacceptable so that plan was not followed through.

Most public toilets in public transit stations closed during the 1960s and 1970s as a means of trying to reinforce class privilege. While most of the 427 subway stations in New York City had public toilet facilities at some point, by the early 1980s, they almost all were locked and made inaccessible to the public. Some of this was because they had begun to develop reputations as being places where people had public sex and used drugs.

A 1990 survey by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found a median of 73% of secondary school students knew that HIV / AIDS could not be contracted in public toilets.

President Bill Clinton signed the Energy Policy Act in 1992.  This required all new flush toilets in the United States to use no more than 1.6 gallons per flush.

Many public toilets were closed in the early 2000s as part of security measures following the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Around 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg responded to criticism regarding a lack of public toilets in the city by saying that there were enough Starbucks that would let people use them to make up for the lack of city provided public toilets. Starbucks by and large did step in and let everyone use their toilets for a long period of time, sometimes without requiring people be customers and sometimes with controversy when people were denied access to their facilities. A New York Times reporter joking advised Republican National Convention delegees in 2004 to use the toilets at McDonalds if they had to go because the city had so few public ones that all the locals used Starbucks toilets.  Starbucks nominally support this idea that New Yorkers and in other places in the US should use their toilets because they earned money from people coming into their stores for that purpose as people often bought drinks after using the toilet.

Starting in the early 2000s, Portland, Oregon began a push to put user-friendly stand-alone public toilets on street corners.  They were designed to be vandalism proof.  Their designed proved popular, and the toilets were later installed in other cities including Denver, Cincinnati, San Antonio and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1.7 million people in the United States lacked access to sanitation in 2008.

Portable Toilets lined up along street toward the capitol in Washington DC

Starting in January 2008, New York City started installing stand-alone self-cleaning public toilets.  They charged $0.25 to enter, with the toilets having a time allowing for a maximum usage time of 15 minutes.  They were installed across the city, including on in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. The city initially promised to build 20 of these toilets, but by August 2018, only five had been installed.  The remaining 15 toilets that the city had already paid for were being stored in a warehouse in Queens.

Starting in the 2010s, San Diego started installing toilets near its public beaches.  Their public toilet investment though did not extend to downtown, where such facilities continue to be lacking. The Washington, D.C. City Council enacted the Public Restrooms Act in 2019.  The law was designed to increase public toilet access in underserved parts of the city.  Despite the law, by 2021, only two new standalone public toilets were in the planning stage.

In the 2010s and 2020s, many state high departments were trimming their budgets. One area that many found they could save money on was by reducing the number of public toilets on their highway networks.

In the period between 2017 and 2018, there were several outbreaks of Hepatitis A Virus (HAV) in the United States that were driven largely by a result of homeless people and rough sleepers not having access to proper sanitary facilities, often a result of a lack of public toilets and resulting in open defecation.  Early in this period after first emerging in San Diego and resulting in 20 deaths, the outbreak spread to Arizona, Utah and Kentucky.

Starbucks codified their policy of allowing non-customers to use their toilets following an incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in 2018 when two black men were arrested in the store while waiting for a friend after one of the men asked to use the toilet and an employee responded by calling the cops.

There was a lack of public toilets in the early 2020s, a problem that became more apparent after restaurants, bars and retail locations limited access to or closed their toilet facilities during the Covid pandemic. There was a toilet paper shortage in 2020 as a result of panic buying during the first few weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. During the Covid pandemic, commercial drivers often had to resort to extreme measures to use the toilet.  This included peeing into bottles.  Homeless people also had issues finding adequate toilet facilities. Some resorted to using adult diapers and others to buckets filled with kitty litter.

Starbucks’ interim CEO Howard Schultz said in June 2022 that the company was considering limiting public toilet access across their United States stores, citing the increasing problems of dealing with people with mental health issues using them who can in turn pose a risk for Starbucks staff and Starbucks customers.

Sex-segregated toilets

A map of US states showing which mandate all single-person restrooms to be all-gender.

A sign on a door for an All Gender Restroom with Urinals in the University Center at the University of Montana.

Sex-segregated toilets in the United States have been controversial and contentious at times. In quasi public spaces in the Western world with toilet facilities, there is rarely rigid sex separation.  This includes in large, private homes where lots of entertaining is done. Terry Kogan argues the sex-segregated public toilets are exclusionary because they prevent opposite sex partners from helping wheelchair users, put transsexual and intersexed people at risk, create longer lines for women, and can create situations where parents cannot accompany opposite-sex children into public toilets. Phyllis Schflafly believed that equal rights for women would be measured as having been achieved when public toilets were no longer sex-segregated. In the 2000s, public toilets were one of the last remaining sex segregated spaces in the United States.

The first law mandating sex-segregation of public toilets in the United States occurred in Massachusetts in 1877. The statue was named, An Act to Secure Proper Sanitary Provisions in Factories and Workshops.  It said, "suitable and proper wash-rooms and water-closets shall be provided for females where employed, and the water-closets used by females shell be separate and apart from those used by males." Such toilets had existed as early as the 1880s, but not with the force of law. A statue was created in California was amended in 1889, requiring sex separation of toilets. By 1920, 43 states had adopted similar provisions.

Because Prohibition saw an increase in the construction of public toilets to address the new found demand, many municipalities located outside the South built sex-segregated public toilets that were essentially the same construction inside, with the same number of stalls and layout for each. Because women were less likely than men to use public toilets in the 1910s and 1920s, many towns and cities made women's comfort stations smaller than men's toilets.  Women's toilets also often had shorter hours because women at that time felt less comfortable being out on the streets at night.

The United States Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 established the right to legal separation of people by sex in places like public toilets.

Opposition in the 1970s to the Equal Rights Amendment came from people like Phyllis Schlafly  who feared it would end sex-segregation in public toilets.  They branded the law as the "Common Toilet Law." President Jimmy Carter spoke in response to such comments, saying, “There's been a lot of distortions about the Equal Rights Amendment. It doesn't say anything about bathrooms.” Then Governor Ronald Reagan criticized the 1973 Equal Rights Amendment, saying it could “degrade and defeminize women by forcing them to mingle with men in close, intimate quarters.”  He was referring to public toilet access. These fears around public toilets were one of the major reasons the constitutional amendment did not pass.

The country's transgender population began to advocate in the 1990s to use the public toilet that best aligned with their gender identity instead of their sex.  The issue soon became contentious, especially as in some cases it required redesigning public toilets to cater to security needs expressed by the transgender community.

A survey of 27,000 transgender people in the United states in 2015 found 26 percent were denied access to the toilet that aligned with their gender identity in the previous year.

Starting in 2018, transgender people in the United States begin to get the right to access toilets based on their gender identity and not their sex. Public toilet needs for the transgender population have, in parts of the United States, been prioritized over the public toilet needs of women despite the relative size of the two populations.

Women's toilets

There has historically been a lack of parity in the number of men's public toilet compared to women's public toilets. Organizations like American Restroom Association (ARA) have worked to try to address this gap. Women's toilets often require special sex-specific features.  This includes places to dispose of tampons and sanitary napkins.  The disposal container is often a large plastic bin.  In smaller toilet stalls, this can make it difficult for women to sit because of these disposal bins may touch the seat or a woman may come into contact with them when she sits on the toilet seat.

During the Victorian period, a woman's modesty could be threatened by the act of using a public toilet. Sex segregation of women's toilets in factory settings as done to preserve women's modesty and because women were viewed as having weak bodies. Victorian ideals included the concept that a woman's place was in the home.  Consequently, few women's public toilets were built in order to try to encourage middle and upper class women to stay home. Starting in the 1920s, middle and upper-class women living in cities stopped using public toilets, and instead shifted to toilets in facilities like hotels, theaters, train stations and department stores. Women were often uncomfortable at public toilets in the 1930s, because they were easily outnumbers by men and the facilities were often egalitarian.  As a result, middle class women who could left public toilets and instead used toilets in department stores, who provided much nicer facilities.

By 1897, public toilers in New York City were being used by around 1,000 men on a daily basis.  The daily average of women using public toilets was around 25.  One of the reasons women did not use them is the facilities were small, and upper class women did not have room to maneuver and pee while wearing long, space taking dresses.  Women also avoided them because they were frequently very hot inside during the summer and freezing cold during the winter.  This was in part a result of of the cast-iron construction design.

Providing low cost menstrual items for low-income and homeless women in places like schools has become an important issue for some homeless and menstrual movement advocates in the United States.

Because of fears around cleanliness, some women in the United States try to flush public toilets with their feet.

Renaming women's toilets to gender neutral or unisex toilets while leaving men's toilets alone in the United Kingdom and United States has put greater pressure on women in these spaces because these facilities have not expanded in size but are expected to cater to a larger number of users while at the same time the number of users in the men's toilets remains unchanged.

Many women in the United States are wary when it comes to using public toilets.  This ranges from a variety of factors, including fear of catching germs.  A consequence of this is they sometimes set themselves up for future medical problems by trying to hold it in.

Imprisoned women

A case was brought by the Michigan ACLU against a prison related to the restriction of menstrual products and private toilet access by incarcerated women. After one woman in the case asked for additional menstrual products, the guard yelled at her, telling her she better not bleed on the floor. The Los Angeles County Jail frequently punished women by restricting access to menstrual products. They also often lacked access to toilet facilities to change menstrual products. 54% of women in a Correctional Association of New York survey said they lacked sufficient  access to menstrual products while incarcerated.  When products were available at the commissary, they were often too expensive for most inmates.  They also often lacked access to toilet facilities to change menstrual products.

Homeless women

In the 2010s, the lack of public toilet provisions for homeless women and rough sleeping women put them at risk gender violence, harassment and shame around defecation when they were forced situationally to engage in open defecation.

Men's toilets

Sex in men's toilets

The 1962 case Bielicki v. Superior Court in the California courts found that stalls had to offer maximum levels of privacy for people to consider public toilets as places with an expectation of privacy. In that case, the stalls had no doors.

The Supreme Court denied certiorari in People v. Hensel related to police surveillance of public toilets in 1965. Smayda v. United States was a case at the 9th Circuit Court in 1965 related to police survelliance of public toilets.  The police in a town in California, with assistance from the manager, observed three stalls in a men's toilets at Yosemite National Park.  The stalls had doors that were 18 inches above the floor and the doors did not have latches.  As a result, there was a minimal expectation of privacy.  The police set up their surveillance on Saturday night after 11pm for a number of consecutive weekends where they photographed a number of male individuals engaging in homosexual activity, photographed them and then and charged them with violating the Assimilative Crimes Act.  At court, a defendant tried to claim an expectation of privacy to suppress evidence.  This was denied by the district court.  The Court of Appeals also looked at that claim, deciding that the defendant had waived a right to privacy, that search was not unreasonable given the Fourth Amendment as police had cause to suspect a crime was going to take place, and that public toilets are not defined as a "house" so the police did not need to execute a search warrant.  One of the judges dissented saying the police, by cutting holes in the ceiling, has an intrusion and the court in other circumstances had not found this type of activity a unreasonable search. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in Smayda v. United States in 1965, ultimately one of three cases that year which the court would deny certiorari.

Disability accessible toilets

Disability activists protested outside the Health, Education, and Welfare  in San Francisco for twenty-five days in the 1970s, demanding more be done to support their rights to access public spaces.  This included demands around public toilet access.  They were supported by unions, Bay  Area  countercultural  groups and  Oakland’s  Black Panthers.

Several groups of disability rights activist organizations protested outside the Department of Housing, Education, and Welfare in April 1977.  They also held protests at eight regional offices.  They demanded that the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and its Section 504 be implemented, ending discrimination against people with disabilities in programs that received public funding.  Part of their complaints involved the lack of access to public toilets.

The Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990.  Among other things, it talked about public toilet design.

The AARP in the 2020s has given grants of over USD$70,000 to cities and towns including Biddeford in Maine, Delaware County in Ohio, Boulder County in Colorado and Fairfax in California to make their public toilets more accommodating to older members of their community by making them compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.