Rushing to McDonald’s, sneaking into Trump Tower: the desperate struggle to find a public toilet in New York

Why is it so hard to find a public bathroom in New York? The city of over 8 million people operates a paltry 1,000 bathrooms – that’s one for every 8,000 New Yorkers. Anyone running errands in one of the five boroughs who doesn’t want to pay for an overpriced bottle of water in exchange for a cafe’s bathroom code must brave a decades-old public toilet that might be poorly lit, out of toilet paper, or covered in … something.

Now Mayor Eric Adams has a plan … well, sort of. In a press conference this week, Adams launched Ur In Luck (get it?), an initiative to expand access to public restrooms across all five boroughs.

According to the plan, the New York City department of parks and recreation will build 46 new restrooms and renovate 36 existing ones, which means adding stalls, improving accessibility, or implementing energy-efficient features.

In the meantime, the city has introduced a Google Maps layer that New Yorkers can add to their phones and use anytime they are on the hunt for a toilet.

The feature replicates one created by Teddy Siegel, a 25-year-old opera singer and, for lack of a better descriptor, public toilet influencer. Siegel earned viral fame as the poster behind @got2gonyc , which chronicles the good, and very bad, public restrooms of the city to more than 549,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram combined.

“It’s a step in the right direction,” Siegel said of the mayor’s plan. “But the plan is only about 82 bathrooms in total, for a city with over 8.5 million people and millions of tourists. That’s not really going to cut it. But it’s definitely just really great that we have the mayor’s support and that people overall are talking about it.”

Many of the city’s bathrooms date back to the 1930s, when, according to the New York Times, the Works Progress Administration and Civil Works Administration added more than 2m bathrooms across the country. In 1934 alone, the controversial parks commissioner Robert Moses supervised the renovation of more than 145 “comfort stations”, Urban Omnibus reports . Today, from the outside, it appears that little has changed about these structures.

Siegel started her crusade (or, as a mayoral copywriter might call it, poo-sade) when she couldn’t find a free public toilet near Times Square, nearly having an accident inside a midtown McDonald’s. Since then, she’s received comments and messages from all kinds of New Yorkers detailing their struggle to use the restroom with dignity.

One formerly unhoused woman told Siegel that when she and her husband lived on the streets, cafes denied them bathroom codes, even if they offered to buy something, just because of how they looked. An expectant mother said she had peed herself inside a Starbucks because the staff wouldn’t let her use the restroom. A camp counselor said she had been forced to change children’s diapers inside a disgusting Prospect Park toilet that was smeared with human feces. A woman menstruated through her pants inside a CVS, begging to use a bathroom so she could insert the tampons she had just bought.

“These are the stories people deal with, and they just live with shame because they feel like they can’t talk about it,” Siegel said. “It shouldn’t be something we’re embarrassed to talk about, because it’s one of the most unifying parts of the human experience. No matter who you are, what you believe in, or where you live, everyone uses the bathroom. It’s all something we have in common.”

It shouldn’t be something we’re embarrassed to talk about. It’s one of the most unifying parts of the human experience

Teddy Siegel

Yes, everybody relieves themselves, but some have it easier than others. “If you want to use the bathrooms, it really helps to be middle class,” said Lezlie Lowe, author of No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs. “It sounds absurd, but so much of the way we use bathrooms in cities is going into Starbucks or McDonald’s, and breezing past the counter because you have social class privilege or authority. If I need to use the restroom and have to buy a Starbucks muffin, fine, I will take that hit. But not everybody has that ability.”

Steve Soifer, a professor of social work at Adelphi University and founder of the American Restroom Association, which advocates for public toilets, likes to go to Bloomingdale’s when he needs a New York restroom. “It’s unisex, which is a design I advocate for, and it’s a hallway with eight individual closeted toilets,” he said. But he acknowledges that it’s a privilege to be able to waltz into a luxury department store unnoticed.

Soifer’s second-favorite public bathroom? Bryant Park. Described as “the most luxurious public bathroom in New York”, it’s funded by private donors, inside a Beaux Arts building just steps away from the main branch of the public library. A bathroom attendant beckons guests inside, where they’ll hear classical music playing on the speakers, view bespoke art, and smell fresh flowers posted near the door and sink. According to Atlas Obscura, the $300,000 renovation took place in 2017, and includes toilets made by the same “luxury brand” found in the Museum of Modern Art.

“They thought about everything, right down to the detail of the flowers they set out every day,” said Dan McPhee, executive director at the Urban Design Forum. In 2020, the non-profit published a report on how to tackle the lack public restrooms in New York City, suggesting that the city focus on making new toilets cost-effective, safe, attractive, and easy to maintain.

Related: Relief as San Francisco public toilet finally opens – and not for $1.7m after all

“I think we should set the bar higher for design, and reward businesses for this kind of public service,” McPhee added, suggesting ideas like an annual award to the best-designed toilet. “We can create public buildings that communities are proud of.”

Siegel lists Bryant Park as one of her favorite bathrooms, with a big caveat. The bathrooms are small – just three toilets each for men and women – and gendered. This means that women languish in line while men breeze in and out; a bathroom attendant keeps women out of the men’s room, even when no one’s in there.

“The lines are so annoying, especially in the wintertime. I don’t attempt to go when there’s the winter village, because there’s just a line down the block. I always end up going [next door] to the public library then.”

Everyone I spoke to described Bryant Park as some sort of crown jewel, but it failed to impress me. The orchids were nice, and so are toilet seat covers that automatically change at the press of a button. But the classical music and frosted glass windows reminded me of a funeral home, and, yes, the lines were long.

Still, Bryant Park’s bathrooms operate from 8am to 10pm – some of the longest hours of any restroom in New York. Turns out, the city that supposedly never sleeps does shut its bathrooms quite frequently.

Most, like Fort Greene, operate relatively short hours, usually 8am-4pm. And many are located in libraries, which Mayor Adams recently slashed funding for due to budget cuts, leading to Sunday closures and limited hours. When asked about this, a representative from the mayor’s office did not comment directly but noted: “Most of our public restrooms are located in parks.”

One more go-to restroom in New York: Trump Tower, which, despite the former president’s security detail theater, is shockingly easy to just walk into and use. Siegel made a TikTok about her experience visiting the toilet last year, giving it a 10 out of 10.

“Trump is not known for his generosity, so I was not surprised by the one-ply toilet paper, but this bathroom is definitely one of the cleaner ones I’ve ever been in,” Siegel said in the video, adding, “If you need to take a shit in New York City, I highly recommend doing it in Trump Tower.”

Lowe, who wrote the book about our lack of public bathrooms, recently consulted with leaders from Portland, Maine, who are trying to revitalize their downtown area. “They’re really invested in creating public restrooms, because that’s what they’ve heard from both tourists and residents,” she said. The city has added 13 new bathrooms in the past three years, and five have been installed this spring. It’s less Bryant Park and more porta-potty, though: the structures are unheated and have no running water. That cuts the cost from around half a million dollars a bathroom to between $20,000 and $40,000 a unit.

Siegel said that she hopes to visit Japan soon, both for the usual sights and to experience the Tokyo Toilet Project, which invites world-class architects to create high-end bathrooms. One, created by the Shigeru Ban firm, looks transparent when unused. But walk inside the toilet, lock the door, and the walls change to an opaque pastel shade.

“I feel like New York should look at what other cities are doing, because they’re definitely doing it better than New York,” Siegel said. “Ultimately, it’s the city’s responsibility to provide this to us.”