pissing in a river: the biggest bathroom in the world
There’s no reliable door around this all-too-public toilet (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
In January, I wrote about my fraught relationship with public evacuation facilities (“privacy, public bathrooms, and me: do you mind?”), both in real life and in my dreams, er, nightmares. “I prefer the bathroom door be closed – and locked tight – when I’m on the bowl,” I admitted. Several friends emailed me to say they experience the same dread.
Last week it all came flooding back to me when I encountered a white toilet bowl on a street in the Financial District. The seat was up and the terlet was stuffed with garbage; fortunately I didn’t have to go. Directly behind it was a white van that belonged to a company called Reliable Door. I could have used a reliable door when I was traumatized by that public bathroom in the coffee shop next to the old Gershwin Hotel back in August 2015.
New York City has been described as the world’s largest bathroom; you can’t walk a block or two anywhere without stepping around (or in) human or animal urine and feces. In the June 2020 article “With no public bathrooms, the Big Apple is now ‘the Big Toilet,’” Kirsten Fleming in the New York Post pointed out how the pandemic lockdown led to “a stream of issues — mainly a steady flow of revelers freely peeing in public since most bathrooms remain closed.”
But I take issue with that; New York City was the biggest bathroom in the world before the pandemic, and it continues to be as the crisis dissipates.
Chelsea street offers several options for humans and animals who have to take a leak (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Fifteen years ago, I was meandering on a Chelsea gallery tour when a car pulled up at the corner of Eleventh Ave. and Twenty-Second St. A father got out and guided his child, probably around four or five, over to one of Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Oaks sculptures — basalt stone columns a few feet high — pulled down the boy’s pants, and watched as the kid urinated all over the work of art. They then got back in the car and drove off, leaving a special present behind for the late Mr. Beuys, and me. There was a tree and a fire hydrant right there, but the man clearly didn’t want his son to be seen as some kind of animal.
Which brings me, a cat person, to dog piss (and poop).
A few weeks ago, a young woman and her pooch came out of the automatic glass front doors of our building and onto the walkway that winds toward the sidewalk and the curb. But she stopped about ten feet from the door and let the dog relieve itself in the middle of the paved path. As the pee was spreading across the thoroughfare, which runs a bit downhill, I calmly asked her, “I’m sorry, but do you have to do that right here?” She angrily barked back at me, “What the fuck am I supposed to do?!” So I shouted back, “You’re supposed to train your freaking dog not to go on the freaking walkway!” She and the dog then went back inside, leaving their mess for the doorman to wipe up; they’re used to this, prepared with rags and multisurface cleaning spray.
A few days later, another young woman was walking her dog on the sidewalk and stopped right at the end of the walkway, where her puppy left what seemed to be an endless river of piss that went across the whole path. With Patti Smith’s “Pissing in a River” stirring in my head, I asked the woman if she could have taken her dog three feet over and had it do its business at the curb or the tree stump.
She responded with the same words as the previous woman: “What the fuck am I supposed to do?!” She then started to continue down the block.
I shouted out, “Do you even live here?”
She responded, “Do you? I’ve never seen you before.”
“Well, if you live here, it’s even more fucked up that you’d let your dog go on your own walkway.”
She wandered away, and I went inside to let the doorman know that there was a wonderful river of piss waiting just for him. (I could practically hear Patti singing, “My body’s aching, excreting your soul / What more can I give you, baby, I don’t know / What more can I do here to make this thing grow / Don’t turn your back now, ’cause I’m talking to you.”)
The doorman was chatting with the super, who was not happy when I explained what had just happened. “Not her again. We’ve told her before,” he said, then stomped outside to have a little chat with her.
My wife described the incidents to one of her best friends, who lives in a condo complex in DC, and the friend related a situation that had just occurred at her place: a woman kept letting her dog shit wherever and would never pick it up, staunchly denying the waste was her mutt’s.
The friend told us, “I had to have our office install poop cams to catch a woman not picking up her dog poop. The day after the install, we caught her on tape. She repeatedly insisted and lied it wasn’t her. The whack job says to me, ‘I’m so upset about all the poop!’”
“‘So is our management office,’ I tell her. They were out here with shovels cleaning it up (20+ piles).”
“Perp: ‘I think I know who it is.’”
“She throws my fellow board member’s dog under the bus and moves to exit to her toileting place.”
“‘Please pick up your poop,’ I say.”
“Perp [look of scorn]: ‘ALL of it?!’”
Back in Murray Hill, a few days later I watched in abject horror as a third young woman let her dog take a crap in the middle of the walkway. I decided not to say anything because she picked it up — and I didn’t want to get the reputation as the “Get Off My Walkway Guy” — but it’s still so not cool. Fines for not picking up after pooch poop can run $250 — only eighteen such tickets were issued in 2022 — but there appear to be no laws regarding leaving a pond of piss in the middle of the sidewalk.
Earlier this year, City Council Member Julie Menin initiated a contest for designs for signage advocating for Upper East Siders to curb their dogs. “It’s not the crime that’s driving well-heeled Manhattanites up the wall — it’s all the other crap,” Bernadette Hogan, Jack Morphet, and Bruce Golding wrote in the March 21 New York Post article “Swanky NYC neighborhood overrun with dog poop: ‘Full of s–t.’” City Council Member Sandy Nurse, chair of the sanitation committee, said at a March hearing, referring to some of that other crap, “Rats love to eat dog poop, and that really freaks people out.”
Of course, none of this blame lies at the paws of our canine companions.
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog,” Mark Twain, who owned dogs and lots of cats, boasted. He also wisely explained, “Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
Oh, and before I forget, get off my walkway!
Oh, Mark!!!
This column, like all your wonderful columns, hit me in the face on so many levels!!!
First, because of my job and its bizarre hours and multiple shifts, I drink a lot of hot tea to keep me going. I take the train from Flatbush to Grand Central, and get off there to walk up to my job at 59th Street to get exercise (I do the reverse walk on desolate streets at 12:30 AM), so I usually have to urinate at one point. So, there is a Starbucks at 53rd Street and 3rd, with a bathroom also at the public plaza downstairs if there is a long line at that Starbucks. There is also a Starbucks on 1st Avenue, between 53rd & 54th Street. These three options are my most common choices. Today, I had to take the #2 train to Times Square to the #7 to Grand Central, and used the large bathroom at the lower level there. Because everybody is evacuating the city for the long holiday weekend, there was, as usual, a tremendous line at the ladies room, and no line at the mens room. I was washing up in the mens room, and a woman happened to sidle up to the wash basin next to me - I guess that line was just too damn long!!!
As a doorman, the dog issue is an issue very close to my heart, as I constantly see people have their dogs defecate and urinate directly in front of my lobby entrace door. I also have to clean up dog feces that people leave there, as well as residual feces that they do not clean up well.
Ironically, I WALK DOGS FOR TENANTS in the building where I work, before, during, and after my shift - they pay me for this, as well as the cat care I give to multiple tenants. When I walk a dog, rest assured that dog is NOT URINATING OR DEFECATING ANYWHERE NEAR THE FRONT ENTRANCE TO ANY BUILDING, NOR IN ANYBODY'S IMMEDIATE PATHWAY TO THEIR BUILDING.
I am actually convinced that at one point, I will be jailed for manslaughter, and Ann Marie will have to visit me Upstate, even though I'm too pretty for prison, and will be passed around like a ragdoll for cigarettes. My manslaughter conviction will be for killing a sloppy dog walker, or a bike rider, moped rider, electric board rider, or scooter rider, but the latter four are a whole other story, of which you probaby have a few yourself!!!
Always a pleasure!!!
Glenn