Compared to my neighborhood of Rogers Park, where unfettered bathroom access is basically limited to the public library and Target, my piss map is a little bigger downtown. Union Station has bathrooms. If you’re a little slick with how you’re dressed, you can sneak into the granite-sinked suite in the upper lobby of the Palmer House Hotel. 900 Michigan Avenue, a vertical mall designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox in 1989, has them on the second and fifth floors. Perhaps the best loos, however, are the ones in the Harold Washington Library, which are as teal and pink and postmodern as the rest of the overscaled, overornamented building.

But these are paltry offerings. In Chicago, a city of just over 2.7 million, there are only around five hundred publicly accessible restrooms, many of which, such as those in public parks, have strict operating hours and are closed during the winter. That’s one bathroom per every 5,400 persons. This shortage is not unique to the Windy City: From the Big Apple to liberal San Francisco to the Deep South, more often than not, pissing is a privilege with a price tag, not a right. When one in need approaches a promising door, the sign will almost always say “For Customers Only.”

This is the title of Bryant Simon’s new book, an edifying journey through what is perhaps one of the most consistent, albeit under-examined, public policy failures in the history of local and national governance: providing the general public with a place to do their business. This isn’t just a matter of convenience or inconvenience; the public restroom is, as Bryant argues, an “entryway” to wider society and, as such, has been the subject of intense debate ever since the city of New York opened the first one in the United States, at Astor Place in 1869. Women’s, civil, and gay rights activists all recognized the loo as a nexus of discrimination and have fought to guarantee access to this most basic tenet of a dignified life.

Public bathrooms engage with questions of freedom—of movement in cities and towns and on the road—and privacy, both literally and in terms of the ability to enter one of society’s more vulnerable situations without risk of interrogation or conflict. Bathrooms illuminate the ways those in positions of social power feel entitled over the bodies and actions of others. “Public bathrooms,” Bryant writes, “were always about political power, the seen and unseen political power of infrastructure.” Recent skirmishes over homelessness and trans rights have shown that the fight is far from over.

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For Customers Only begins with how we all got so wrapped up in public potty discourse in the first place. Though the first public toilet in the United States debuted in New York City, the idea gained wide popularity at the Philadelphia World’s Fair in 1893, where the Clow Sanitary Company offered both free and paid lavatories to the twenty-seven million attendees. But in a world still full of privies, outhouses, and latrines, it was the Workingman’s House model that most captivated fairgoers. This modest two-story dwelling, designed to sell for $3,000 and be paid off by a plumber or a carpenter within ten years, offered something novel: an enclosed bathroom “connected to a network of hidden pipes and traps that brought in clean water and took away what was deemed foul and dirty.” This was evidence of “higher civilization, as well as a truer idea of American life,” as one delighted observer remarked.

As the population of modern metropolises exploded, there were more people on the go who needed to go. One of—if not the—great ironies of Simon’s historiography is that the problems these original late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century toilet patrons faced are of a kind with those we still face today. People, especially women, were forced to rely on an unreliable network of privately owned spaces: hotel lobbies (Palmer House!), rail stations (Union Station!), and department stores (900 North Michigan Avenue!). Men, meanwhile, had greater access to bathrooms through bars, saloons, and taverns, which were located on every city block and open late into the night.

This was untenable. Hence the entry of this history’s only actually progressive thinkers: the literal Progressives of Progressive-era fame. By the 1910s and 1920s, a number of reformers, including prohibitionists and women’s and immigrant rights activists, assembled to campaign in places like Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., for the construction of public bathrooms, or “comfort stations,” as they were euphemistically called. For them, the idea was not just to create civic or social value—to get citizens to feel “the intimate regard for governmental powers” as one reformer put it—but to create, through the sanitary powers of the post-germ theory porcelain bathroom, a sanitary and upstanding American populace.

These modern “technologies of excretion,” particularly the flush toilet, which could seemingly disappear your shit into the unknown, “summoned a revolution in government action, class identity, and everyday emotions,” Simon writes. And it was so: A boom never to be repeated in public bathroom construction followed. According to Simon, by 1920, over 160 cities had built comfort stations. Some were exquisitely beautiful, like the Sullivanesque bathrooms at St. Louis Union Station; others were dug underground to hide the unmentionable from view. Unfortunately, gender inequity persisted. Simon cites the astonishing statistic that New York City’s comfort station in Astor Place served one thousand men a day but only twenty-five women, in part because there were more urinals for men than there were toilets for women, and because the stigma around excreting bodily fluids outside the home was much stronger for women.

Women’s “biggest gripe,” Simon writes, “was about privacy. They felt the Astor Place bathroom was too public and that they were in plain sight as they made their way to the toilet.” Of course, gender roles impacted this phenomenon—the idea that women can be preyed upon at any second is one that’s still around today. Yet people treated these new facilities with suspicion for reasons beyond gender, cleanliness, or misbehavior. The major question surrounding public bathrooms was who, exactly, was using them, and who was allowed to be in intimate proximity to others. “You never know who is on the other side of [the stall door],” Simon quotes a woman concerned about strangers at the turn of the century—though she could just as easily have been a Republican in Ohio clutching her pearls about trans women in 2026.

In addition to offering a history of the public toilet, Simon focuses each chapter on a different struggle in which bathrooms suddenly became a political football. They include the Jim Crow era of racial segregation; the persistent private alternatives to bathrooms, whether through pay toilets (from the 1890s on to the 1970s) or coffee shops today; vice patrols (which reached their height in the 1920s); and scaremongering around crime (with us still today). Consider the Equal Rights Amendment, the proposed amendment at the heart of liberal feminist organizing in the 1970s, which declared that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.” Phyllis Schlafly infamously attacked the legislation by claiming that it would end “sex segregation” in bathrooms and put women at risk of being sexually assaulted or otherwise preyed on.

This turned the public bathroom into, as Simon writes, “a potent symbol of the traditional social order and the broader chaos that would ensue if some people were made more equal.” One woman from North Carolina feared the end of sex segregation would erase all “protection laws for women” that she argued represented “the culmination of centuries of effort by civilized society.” Perhaps it goes without saying the amendment was ultimately defeated.

Equal bathroom access was also a flash point in the Black struggle for civil rights. During the Jim Crow era, many bathrooms in the South were separated by three doors: Men, Women, and Colored. Behind the colored door, one often found humiliating conditions of squalor and neglect. Tired of the indignity, many people of color withdrew from public life, afraid of the retribution of white people deputized to reinforce racial boundaries via the status quo. They stayed home to avoid being caught out. The possibility of violence—perhaps even fatal—that came with using the wrong bathroom when a segregated one wasn’t available was often too much to ask. Travel guides helped those on the road find adequate facilities, but merely trying to use a public bathroom could turn deadly, as was the case of Samuel Leamon Younge Jr., a black university student leader who was shot by a white gas station owner for trying to use its bathroom in 1965. The fight for bathroom access mirrored struggles against other “separate but equal” public facilities, like schools and lunch counters. At great personal peril, Alabama educator Mary Fair Burks walked into a white ladies’ bathroom where she taught and lost her job. Meanwhile, the Freedom Riders walked into white bathroom after white bathroom as a collective protest.

From public toilets’ inception in the late nineteenth century, American opponents frequently peddled the idea that because lavatories are used for dirty (and more importantly intimate) business, they are a magnet for unsavory individuals wanting to commit even dirtier deeds; or worse, because these facilities were open access, these people wanted something for free. As early as the 1890s, police began conducting stings on public restrooms on Long Island and in Manhattan, targeting homosexual men engaging in public sex. In Philadelphia in the 1940s, police arrested up to two hundred men a month on indecency charges. These vice raids were seen as a symbol of “the failure of comfort stations to remake the city along the lines of middle class respectability” and were what Simon rightly calls “one of the unacknowledged building blocks of mass incarceration.” The practice of entrapment continues today.

Gruesome stories about strangulation victims found in toilet stalls only accentuated public bathrooms’ reputation as fundamentally unsafe. The 1936 murder of a salesman named Edgar Eckert in a Times Square-42nd Street subway station bathroom was sensationalized by the press, in part because of the lewd connotations offered by the setting, and triggered a moral panic about crime in and around public lavatories. Muckrakers enshrined the perception of the subway system as crime-ridden and dangerous, leading to the almost immediate closure of dozens of subway comfort stations across Manhattan.

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The photo negative of the public bathroom is, of course, the private toilet, which is what the middle section of Simon’s book is devoted to. Fees, according to Simon, were a form of “social editing”—wherein people choose not to go out at all rather than face the violence of discrimination or the humiliation of having nowhere to use the bathroom—and a result of the privatization of the 1980s and 1990s as well as the decline in funding for public restroom construction and maintenance. The poor were essentially priced out of peeing. Invented at the turn of the century, the first iteration of the pay-to-pee regime was the amusingly named “Nik-O-Lok” toilet, a coin-operated door that made millions off the idea that paying for toilets would be an “investment” on behalf of the customer, whom they would then reward with comfort and better sanitation, a myth that could be dispelled by the testimony of anyone who has dropped a quarter into a slot to take a leak.

In the 1970s, Nik-O-Lok bathrooms were crushed by local and national bans, which came on the heels of concentrated public protests. One of the leading groups battling against coin-operated pissers was called CEPTIA (Committee to End Pay Toilets in America), on the grounds that paying to piss was, in the words of one member, “a barbaric blight on America.” Yet without new public bathrooms to replace the retired pay toilets, one ends up back where one started: with nowhere to go. There were once fifty thousand Nik-O-Lok toilets in the United States—and most were never replaced with an alternative when they were shuttered. And why would they be if they weren’t bringing in any money? Simon does not provide any statistics on this; however, he does cite the almost immediate rise of guides on “where to go” that popped up in the wake of Nik-O-Lok.

Anecdotally, any city dweller would tell you that, without a public option, private loos in coffee shops, grocery stores, and bodegas have become less-than-stellar replacements for the coin-operated toilets of yore. Starbucks, which arrived in metropolises across the country in the 1990s and spread like wildfire, were the first among equals in the new regime of private–public bathrooms. Rather than pay a nickel at the Nik-O-Lok, now you, bladder-distressed paeon, were made to pay for a latte.

Sex segregation, meanwhile, is still the order of the day, with women still having fewer places to pee than men and longer lines to use those facilities. (In the mid-2000s, a number of cities, including Los Angeles and New York, passed “potty parity” laws stipulating that in new public venues more stalls had to be provided in women’s restrooms to make them comparable to men’s with the hope of eliminating long lines at sporting events or concerts. Of course, this is rarely enforced.) Now, sex segregation has become entangled with fearmongering about who even counts as a woman as transphobes and TERFs take to the stalls and legislators stoke moral panic. In Simon’s words, “That right to security superseded any other rights and justified any sort of discriminatory move.”

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The situation remains undeniably shitty. According to Simon, “by the early 2010s, New York City had somewhere between 4 and 6 public toilets for every 10,000 residents.” Under Parks Commissioner Robert Moses, that number was 145. Across the country, according to a 2011 report Simon cites, cities and towns “had woefully inadequate availability of public restrooms,” with just under eight bathrooms per every one hundred thousand persons.

But the winds may be changing. Chicago plans to open a new self-cleaning bathroom in the JCDecaux style—free, but you have to look at an ad when you pee. San Diego is building Portland Loos, prefabricated restrooms with slats for visibility (should someone be sleeping in there) and ventilation, and which also feature blue lights to deter intravenous drug use. And New York City just announced the construction of a mere seventeen new public bathrooms powered by privately owned company “Throne Labs” that, despite being free, can only be accessed via phone (with card access provided by certain “community partners”) and which have strict time limits, enforced through an automatically opening door. The public bathroom may be reentering the public agenda, but the imaginations of city officials are limited.

As for the limits of imagination go, one can also add architecture in there, given how little impact the field has had on solving this problem. This is especially true with regard to the “stall problem” in women’s restrooms and the spatial segregation first of restrooms for women, then people of color, and then later for gender-nonconforming people. Perhaps one exception to the rule was when the Americans with Disabilities Act forced building owners to retrofit pre-existing restrooms with handicap stalls. (The campaign for disability rights, despite the extent to which it shaped bathrooms both architecturally and as sites of resistance, is not mentioned at all in Simon’s book, a considerable oversight.)

Indeed, the failure of architectural thinking is, in some sense, the most disappointing of the litany Simon’s book charts. For even when building codes and legislation permit the architect to imagine otherwise—more stalls for women! Gender inclusivity!—the architect does not do this. For many, the bathroom remains the most bothersome and least interesting part of the building, a copy-paste. Maybe you’ll get some nice fixtures if you’re lucky. By the end of his study, Simon has spent no time on the numerous and tidy public restrooms of Europe or drumming up support for the social democratic fever dreams books of this ilk tend to offer up. He knows the landscape among which he dwells, the American one, in which you bite your nose to spite your face. In an almost gristled, begrudging manner, he proffers a lone solution to the question of actually existing bathroom inequity: the end of sex segregation, to be replaced with single-stall toilets and floor-to-ceiling partitions—that horrible outcome Schafly was so afraid of.

In this, Simon is unambiguously correct. This kind of bathroom is already coming into use in a limited capacity, with recent installations in buildings like the new David Geffen Hall in New York and the Timeline Theater in Chicago. I was on the press preview tour when Geffen Hall opened up after an extensive renovation in 2022. The architects, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, were guiding the gaggle of critics and reporters through the building, and when we got to the bathroom, the tour was puzzled. Ladies murmured to themselves; men bobbed their heads around corners. Things had been one way for so long that they couldn’t imagine them otherwise.