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Why public bathrooms are hard to come by in LA, according to a historian
Public restrooms are hard to access in a place like Southern California.
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Why are public bathrooms so hard to find?
With the World Cup fully underway and the LA28 Olympics on the horizon, bathroom access is bound to cause a stir for fans visiting from all around the world.
Los Angeles, like other major cities in the U.S., doesn’t have the most robust stock of accessible restrooms, and although that’s nothing new, it wasn’t always like this.
Read more: Visiting LA? Our public bathrooms are tricky to find but we’ve got maps
LA’s opulent toilets
As it turns out, L.A. was one of the epicenters of the early 20th century bathroom boom (no pun intended).
Temple University Prof. Bryant Simon, who is the author of the forthcoming book For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, joined AirTalk, LAist’s daily news program, to talk about the history of public bathrooms and how we got to where we are today.
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“Cities would compete with each other to build the most lavish public bathrooms,” Simon said. “In 1911 in L.A., the mayor held a ribbon-cutting ceremony and bragged about how ornate the bathroom was.”
When things started to go down the toilet
The goal was simple: encourage the public to feel safe and confident leaving their homes by creating convenient spaces for people to relieve themselves.
Instead, these public bathrooms attracted a different type of crowd.
“Drinkers and smokers, people using drugs and most ominously for city leaders, people seeking sex,” Simon said, adding that almost immediately authorities throughout Southern California started arresting men who were seeking sex with other men.
“We have pay toilets now. It's called Starbucks."
— Bryant Simon, Temple University professor and author
So, cities felt they had no choice but to close public bathrooms all together.
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“Jim Crow laws fall down and cities closed public bathrooms,” Simon added.
Simon said this trend continued into the 1980s, with stricter policies around homelessness.
Toilet anxiety
United Sites is one of the companies that supplies portable toilets to the city of L.A.
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Today, you can see from this map how many bathrooms there are in the city and county, which has put some LAist listeners in a tough spot and on both sides of the issue.
“ I was skateboarding in downtown Los Angeles. It was a dire situation. I saw a construction site that was nearby, and they had a porta potty, so I had to hop this fence. It was probably 8 or 9 feet tall.” –Derek in Rancho Cucamonga
“There wasn't anything on this particular stretch of [the 91], and some of the places that I went to were actually closed. Things just got so terrible, I had to find the most remote neighborhood, get in the back of my SUV and urinate in a cup.” –Susan in Huntington Beach
“I've been someone who urgently needed a public restroom, and I run hospitality businesses. We're generally pretty supportive of it, but … we've had people cause massive damage or even had to call the police because people wouldn't leave.” – Steve in Long Beach
Where do we go from here?
Similar to European models — big U.S. cities previously instituted for-pay toilets, but by 1974, they were outlawed after a gender equity campaign argued they discriminated against women who were forced to pay, while men could use urinals for free.
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“ We have pay toilets now. It's called Starbucks,” Simon said.
Starbucks is trying to stem the loss of customers by simplifying its menu, reintroducing ceramic mugs and making other changes to be more like a local coffee house.
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Godofredo A. Vásquez
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Simon added that when private companies are essentially operating public toilets, they tend to become inherently unfair because the focus is on profits.
He says if public bathrooms are to come back at scale, they need to be maintained, including proper cleaning — and this likely means human attendants are involved.
“Public bathrooms have been closed over decades in order to keep other people away to the point that now we're all in the same boat of having no public bathrooms,” Simon said.
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You come to LAist because you want independent reporting and trustworthy local information. Our nonprofit newsroom doesn’t answer to shareholders looking to turn a profit. Instead, we answer to you and our communities. We are free to follow facts wherever they lead and to hold power to account without fear or favor. Our only loyalty is to our readers and listeners and our mission: to inform, engage, and strengthen Southern California’s communities.
If this story helped you, please become a monthly member today to help sustain this mission. It just takes 1 minute to donate below.
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