Public restrooms are something I don’t spend much time thinking about, and that’s mostly because I’m not out of my house or place of work very often. This week’s readings examine how public restrooms and other facilities and spaces are designed and how they have an ongoing history of discrimination.
The article by Grace Schultz, ‘’The NAACP Equalization Strategy and the Dismantling of Segregation in Virginia Public Schools’’ highlights the very difference of bathrooms and facilities based on race during segregation in America. The photos included in this text show how girls bathroom at the Botetourt high school in 1948 looks more akin to a bathroom we are used to seeing today with what appears to be at least 5 individual stalls. Whereas the boys bathroom at Gloucester Training School the same year was a wooden outhouse. Beyond that, their drinking fountains differed as two flanked the girls bathroom that accents the door, while the one for the boys at Gloucester was outside from a metal pipe. Schultz ends their article by discussing how segregation is not just in the past, and how school systems continue to be segregated. A 2019 report from EdBuild stated, ‘’more than half of the nation’s schoolchildren are in racially concentrated districts, where over 75 percent of the students are either white or nonwhite’’.
The segregation of public facilities continues in Harvey Molotch’s chapter, ‘’Bare Life: Restroom Anxiety and the Urge for Control’’. The author discusses how the lack of public restrooms creates a health issue as people are forced to do their business in alleyways or wherever they may be able to find some level of privacy. Gender plays a role in this practice, as the author mentions that men can use the bathroom outside during the day in India, but women must do so at night or in a secluded area. Bathrooms are also typically arranged around a rigid binary, that there is a men’s room and a women’s room. Bathrooms and institutions set up this way alienate transgender people and intersexed people. The author suggests a simple solution that I couldn’t agree more with. Build more restrooms in both poor and rich parts of the world. The article includes blueprints for restrooms and photos of restrooms.
Dr. Simon’s chapter four draft, ‘’Infrastructure’’ starts off with defining infrastructure, a buzzword used by politicians and other people that has so many elements inside it. They continue by telling the story of the building of Union Station and the attention paid to creating the bathrooms to be both functional and attractive. This is a great juxtaposition to what we move to next, which is a journalist named Griffin going in disguise to New Orleans for six weeks to see what life was like as a person of color there. He had to map out locations for bathrooms in his head and found himself in alleyways relieving himself due to the lack of public bathrooms, especially for people of color. Ignoring the problematic fact that Griffin pretended to be a person of color for 6 weeks for a lived experience that he later wrote about, he concluded what most likely every person of color in America has- it’s difficult to exist in a country that continuously isolates and alienates you. Griffin asked someone during his ‘’experiment’’ where the closest church and closest bathroom are. The person responded, ‘’You are going to end up praying for a place to piss’’ (Page 9). The chapter concludes with Washington Square Park and how the bathrooms lack seats. They are dirty and no one is taking care of them. They didn’t even have walls for privacy, and the park manager has no concern about changing that.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere in New Jersey. A real one-horse town (there were lots of horses, but only one traffic light). I knew someone who was homeless for a short period of time, they were living out of their car and we both worked together. Thankfully after a few months, their situation improved. When I moved to Philadelphia I was surprised by seeing as many homeless people as I did in my everyday life, I always just assumed the city had a location that provided shelter and a place for people to live that needed it. I was a pretty naïve kid, and it took me a while to grow up. As I’ve walked the streets of the city more, I’ve come to learn that the city creates structures to prevent the homeless from having any semblance of comfort, and pushes them out of locations. During my time at Eastern State Penitentiary, one of my coworkers was bringing food pretty consistently to what I believe they referred to as the homeless encampment in the area, which was later broken up by the city. Robert Rosenberger’s book, Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless is a short read that I recommend everyone read. In reading this book, I found myself mostly thinking of examples of what the author was discussing that I’ve heard in the news. Such as some unhoused people being removed from streets when they were considered to be occupying too much space to obstruct walking areas, or when the articles about unhoused people using electricity from the grid in LA.
The readings this week point out an alarming issues in our country. Our public facilities are out of date, dirty, and uncared for. Beyond that, they divide gender into a binary and continue to reinforce a segregated legacy in this country. I’m going to be more conscious while walking to look for architecture that is designed to hurt homeless people such as benches with gaps in them so people can’t lie down, as well as how often I see public restrooms.