No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs, by Lezlie Lowe

Dear Diary,

Here at last is my review of this book, which was published by Coach House Books in Toronto, copyright 2018.

It's been hard for me to evaluate, I think, for two main reasons.  One has to do with Lowe's goals in writing it; the other, with how she wrote it.

I think she had two main political goals in the book:  She wanted to make the case, for the countries she focused on (Canada, the UK, and the US), for more public restrooms, rather than the actual trend, which is fewer; and she wanted to make the case for nicer public restrooms, rather than the actual case, which, in those countries, is that people try to avoid them because they aren't nice.  This is a heavy lift.  What I've found in writing you, dear Diary, is that while I'm willing to complain about the most egregiously nasty aspects of particular public restrooms, I'm reluctant to do it all that often, because their mere availability is so much more important.

(She also wanted to tell interesting stories, of course, because that's how one sells a book on this sort of topic.  And she does tell interesting stories, but that's a rhetorical goal, not a political one.)

A particular element of the goal I'd rather she hadn't focused on is that it encourages her to pay relatively little attention to the important of public restrooms for homeless people.  She actually calls this out herself, noting that public restrooms are much more popular when people understand that the homeless aren't actually the only people who use them.  Since (this is me, not her) the homeless are essentially the untouchables of American society, as long as public restrooms are identified with the homeless, calling for restrooms to be nicer is going against public morality, which is that homeless people never deserve nice things.

So much, then, for purposes.  As for methods...

Lowe is a much more successful journalist than I am, and this is partly, I think, because she's mastered pyramid style:  Important stuff first.  This turns out not to be a good strategy for a book, at least not in the eyes of someone like me who tries to finish books.

She starts out incredibly strongly, with page after page introducing her main points and studded with quotable lines, of which I'll restrain myself to one, from page 2:  "the modern [Halifax] Common's twelve hectares hold tennis courts, ball diamonds, a skate park, a swimming pool, and a splash pad.  The place is built for leisure.  Unless, that is, you're the kind of person who uses the bathroom."

Her central point is that public restrooms aren't just open to everyone, they're needed by essentially everyone in modern cities.  Anyone moving around with infants, toddlers or small children needs them.  Anyone moving around with other charges, perhaps wheelchair-bound or infirm or demented, needs them.  Anyone moving around with any of a range of more or less common medical conditions needs them.  And anyone else often needs them anyway, unless they want to spend all their time at home, or have access to private restrooms at work.  (Which brings in people whose jobs involve moving around.)  Tourists need them, not that any of the 100% of American municipalities trying to increase tourism has noticed this. [1]  Oh, and by the way, women need them more - more often, and for menstruating women, at least, for more purposes - than men do.  Not that 51% of the population is a majority or anything...

She drives home the connection between mobility and restrooms with force in a recounting, as late as chapter 6, of the story of Camden Town, London's third women's restroom.  Discussing the work of architectural historian Barbara Penner, she writes:  "When people argue over public bathrooms, Penner says, they're usually fighting about the right of certain social groups to occupy public space....  To allow for the necessity of women's public toilets was to allow that women had the right to move freely through the city."  (Page 99.)

But she isn't satisfied with some number higher than 51%.  She wants to get as close to 100% as she can.  And pyramid style urges her to put what's most important first, so in the book's second half she focuses on ever-smaller groups:  the homeless (chapter 7; this is where Seattle's last attempt to provide public restrooms downtown comes in, pp. 131-132), people with various specific physical disabilities (chapter 8), the transgendered (chapter 9; she ultimately doesn't come to a conclusion).  And winds up with artists' conceptions of public restrooms (chapter 10).

So this is a book that's actually better when dropped somewhere around halfway through, even though Lowe's stock of trenchant observations, engaging interviews and stories, never falters.  It's not by any means a bad book if one finishes it, and those more idealistic than I might appreciate chapters 7 to 9 in the 1990s-style No Body Left Behind spirit in which they were written.  But read roughly the first half, stopping at chapter 6 or just maybe 7, and it's an excellent book.

[1] On my more recent series of hikes of downtown Seattle's parks, I was staring at the credit plaque for one of the sculptures in Pioneer Square, the park that is, when a woman asked what I was doing, and I told her about you, dear Diary.  So she asked me where I would advise someone to go to find a public restroom from that location.  Because, see, she's a tour guide, and she couldn't think of anywhere.

The answer, near as I can tell, is all the way uphill to Seattle City Hall.  And not outside business hours.  After dark?  Hmmm.  I don't think Pike Place Market's restrooms stay open all that late, and one can never predict Seattle Central Library's hours any more - OK, just checked, still closing at 6 P.M. every day.  So hmmm.  I'm not sure when the restrooms at Pier 62 close at night.  Failing those, probably Seattle Center or Cascade Playground, not even two miles away but with traffic lights most of the way.  Still, probably no more than an hour or two out of her tour group's time, if she has any evening or, um, weekend tour groups.  Every time one of the group needs a restroom.

Seattle does have one advantage over Poughkeepsie in the competition to attract more tourists while offering fewer public restrooms.  It's happy to lie about its restrooms, as we'll see as I get back to the downtown pages still to come.