Baldwin PublicPrivacyRestrooms 2014

Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932
Author(s): Peter C. Baldwin

Source: Journal of Social History , Winter 2014, Vol. 48, No. 2 (Winter 2014), pp. 264-
288
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Peter e. Baldwin
Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities,

1869-1932
Abstract
The article examines an effort in the first quarter of the twentieth century to install
public toilets in cities throughout the United States, especially in the prosperous
industrial region of the Northeast and Midwest. The campaign illustrates the
frustrated ambitions in the Progressive Era for a new relationship between public
authority and the private body, a relationship in which the state would protect
privacy, encourage personal care, and hence refine the inner character of the
citizen. In contrast to nineteenth-century public urinals (which were few in
number and intended mainly to prevent public health nuisances) twentieth-century
"comfort stations " were typically large, underground structures at major public
squares. They were to have replaced the privately -owned alternatives in saloons
and other businesses that attracted customers by exploiting their bodily needs.
Women's groups, drawing on a long-established belief that women were the prime
guardians of private wellbeing and moral discipline, were prominent in the cam-
paign for comfort stations in Chicago, New York and other cities. Municipal gov-
ernments even in the largest cities hesitated to build more than a few comfort
stations because of the high cost of construction and maintenance. Comfort stations
proved unsuccessful in competing with department stores, hotels and other privately
owned alternatives. Women in particular opted for the consumer model of privacy,
which preserved class privilege by excluding the less affluent. Almost all of the early
twentieth century comfort stations have since closed, as American cities have aban-
doned the public role in promoting bodily privacy.
The teamster, a reformed drunkard, battled a strong urge as he drove his wag
through Chicago's saloon-lined streets. Unable to resist, he found himself regu
ly entering barrooms until he gave up hope of sobriety. "Speaking with much
terness," wrote the Chicago Tribune columnist Henry M. Hyde in 1913,
blamed the city for his downfall because of its failure to provide toilet facilities
its citizens." A filli bladder was more powerful than thirst for liquor in luring
teamster to the saloon. No other place offered such convenient relief to so m
men, yet this free service carried a price. Men who used the saloon toilet felt
would be rude not to buy a beer and wasteful not to drink it. "Why are we not p
mitted to have free, decent restrooms all over the city?" demanded anot
Journal of Social History vol. 48 no. 2 (2014), pp. 264-288

doi:10.1093/jsh/shu073
© The Author 2014.
Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

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Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932 265
Chicagoan. "Why are we compelled to run the gauntlet past th

tender, and subject to the searching glance of this white-apr
until in shame we start to spend money for booze?"1
Complaints like this helped fuel an effort in the first quarter
century to install public toilets in cities throughout the Unite
in the prosperous industrial region of the Northeast and Mid
governments built restrooms in many downtowns, they balke
networks of "comfort stations" that might adequately compete
saloons and other business places - or replace the saloon after
effect. The campaign for comfort stations faded in the 1920s
initial worries about Prohibition and waning of enthusiasm for
and women continued to rely on restrooms inside private bu
department stores, train stations, hotels, and - after Repeal - t
Beyond helping explain why it's so hard to find a clean pu
American cities today, the story of the comfort station camp
frustrated hopes in the early twentieth century for a new re
public authority and the private body. "The progressive satisf
of all of the people has ceased to be a Utopian ideal; it is now
municipal program," declared Charles Zueblin in 1902. Zuebli
the University of Chicago, was among many reform-minded
tivists who envisioned a new dawn of public service, in which
would replace a culture of greed. A crucial part of governme
would be its stewardship over the bodies of citizens, for int
public health and personal morality. Middle-class beliefs in t
cleanliness guided campaigns for municipal intervention again
substandard housing. Meanwhile, moral crusaders deployed p
ments in fighting the brothel and the saloon. Health and
mingled in state-level campaigns to suppress child labor and
hours.2 By protecting the citizen's physical body, the governm
his inner character and hence his value for society.
Such reform campaigns rested on a redefinition of the pr
life, an ancient concept that had been elaborated into a pillar
culture in the early nineteenth century. In contrast to a narro
shielding the home from state incursions, jurists and soc
Progressive Era sought to defend personal autonomy from t
exploitation found in modern industrial society. An influent
Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis asserted a new legal
"Man, under the refining influence of culture, has become mo
licity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essentia
they explained. Arguing that courts should prevent the press f
seminating personal information, Warren and Brandeis positio
defender of individual dignity.3
As a large literature has shown, the state's expanded r
health, morality, and family life was also encouraged by - and
- an expansion of women's influence in public affairs. In nin
middle-class culture, women were seen as the prime guardian
being, promoting the bodily health and moral discipline of f
Although the idea of gendered private and public spheres
matched reality, middle-class Americans persisted in spea

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266 Journal of Social History Winter 2014
natural place were the secluded domestic interior, and their m

passed private matters of emotion and caregiving. Men were
public spaces of the city, and the public life of business, w
Politically active women destabilized this gender ideology wh
draw upon it. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in 1892 that pri
solitude of self') legitimized women as citizens in the public s
female values of nurturance, other women argued in the ensui
be extended outside the home's protective shell - in effect, b
private boundary so that citizens of all classes could enjoy the b
domestic life.5
Women reformers, not surprisingly, became actively engage
station campaigns of early-twentieth-century Chicago, New
cities. Previously, the concerns that guided construction of n
public urinals had focused on protecting shared environments f
dividuals; these facilities were intended to stop men from stin
and exposing their genitals while urinating against conve
nineteenth-century facilities did not accommodate women, wh
for such indiscreet behavior. Twentieth-century comfort sta
accommodated both sexes. Advocates continued to focus on m
ing temperance benefits: public restrooms could improve the
the Chicago teamster) by keeping him sober. Otherwise, they
neutral terms that comfort stations would demonstrate the
society, relieve individual discomfort, promote health, and e
modesty.
As it turned out, women's personal behavior suggested an uneasiness about
public privacy, which had proven incompatible with the desires for class privilege
and exclusion that still suffused affluent women's understanding of what "private"
meant. City women voted everyday with their seats, preferring the consumer
model of privacy in department store restrooms to the disturbingly messy and egal-
itarian municipal facilities. Men vastly outnumbered women visitors to comfort
stations. Thus, even before the Great Depression shattered municipal finances, the
comfort station campaign had revealed the limited extent to which government-
owned facilities could supplant those in profit-oriented businesses. As civic reform-
ers took stock in the 1930s, they found only a handful of poorly maintained public
restrooms in dank cellars, the disappointing result of what was once a grandiose
civic vision.
Sanitation and Public Urinals in the Nineteenth Century
Concerns about public sanitation motivated early efforts to install public

toilets. The sight and smell of bodily waste were obtrusive facts of life in nine-
teenth century cities, especially for poorer people. Before indoor plumbing, afflu-
ent Americans visited free-standing privies in their backyards, or had servants
dump chamber pots there. Poorer people in tenements used communal privies.
Some of the poorest had no privies at all and simply emptied slops into the gutter
or threw them out the window in the alleyway or street. None of these activities
in a rural setting would be so visible or so likely to affect others, but they occurred
in growing, dense, chaotic cities. Streets already reeked from horse manure and
urine that pooled in cobblestone crevices and soaked into wooden paving blocks.

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The stench of feces and rotting garbage was nauseating even

dards of the time.6
People had lower needs for bodily privacy than we might
early nineteenth century, two-seat privies could be found e
houses. Women as well as men relieved themselves in view o
same sex, as the British actress Fanny Kemble found to her
visit to a beach resort. Men enjoyed telling and playing jok
chamber pots and public urination. City men urinated in alle
buildings. The wall along the Trinity Church graveyard, near
Street and Broadway in New York, was so heavily used that t
was slick with ice. Theaters and auditoriums lacked adequat
nightly crowds to seek relief outdoors. Urinating men, like de
an everyday sight on the street. "Ladies, passing on the sidew
subjected to indelicate displays that they cannot avoid witne
observer. The smell in certain densely populated areas w
New York sanitarian inspector complained in 1865 that pub
gently needed on the Lower East Side to quell "the disgusting
reeking at every alley-corner, yard, and warehouse wall."
The filth and indecency of the street was in stark contras
that affluent Americans were learning to value in their pers
The nineteenth-century, urban middle class increasingly vi
bodily restraint as essential to respectability. Advice literatu
proper women, in particular, must pay attention to the displa
body when in view of others. Heaping scorn on improper no
and scratching, etiquette manuals left little doubt about
organic processes they found too gross to mention. As mid
ashamed of the earthy physicality of excretion, they came to a
ment offered by indoor plumbing, as well as the convenience
draining slops. Many affluent families in the 1840s installe
tubs, and water-closets (no more than one to a room). By 186
closets had been installed in Boston. By 1880, they could be f
urban households; some New England cities reported rates twi
Though water closets often malfunctioned and stank, they
female" the embarrassment of being seen walking to a privy.8
People wanted water closets, but the technology had not
Inventors kept tinkering with combinations of hoppers, pa
and traps, trying to make the stuff just go away. Various c
brass, wood and ceramic all proved unsatisfactory, while pl
hookups presented additional problems. The earliest water clo
on rainwater cisterns and drained into privy vaults or cess
and expanded public water systems in the mid nineteenth c
closets became more common, the flood of wastewater over
and trickled into the streets. City governments responded
property owners hook into sewer systems that had been des
runoff. As these systems failed under heavy use, cities in th
century installed larger systems designed specifically for was
tary facilities were thus subsidized by massive public investmen
Amid repeated cholera epidemics in the mid nineteenth ce
and other educated Americans took greater interest in clean

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spaces. Doctors agreed there was a link between filth and poor
precise connection was unclear; not until the 1880s and 18
opinion swing toward the theory that germs caused disease. St
about dirty water and "miasmatic" vapors drew attention to im
environment. Dr. John Griscom's report on The Sanitary Condi
Condition of New York in 1845 called for expanding the water
sewers, and removing excrement and garbage from the streets
1850 Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts pr
about Boston and likewise called for state intervention.10
In 1865, New York physicians issued a new study of their c
the Council of Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens Assoc
Upon the Sanitary Condition of the City, which included among
recommendations a call for public urinals. The city governmen
considered installing sidewalk urinals for men, on the model of
entrepreneurial French immigrant had even offered to install
lower Manhattan at his own expense. These would consist of
columns 10 feet high and three in diameter, partially open o
inside of which water would trickle over the lower wall; he wo
for advertising space. As the city failed to act, the newly est
Metropolitan Board of Health took up the issue in 1866. The
restrooms in heavily travelled areas near major theaters: a larg
and Broadway near City Hall with a ground level newsstand a
closets, and a smaller one at Astor Place and Eighth Street. H
to spend, and facing opposition from property owners on Br
ended up building only the one at Astor Place. It insisted, th
urinals were needed in New York and Brooklyn for sanitary re
"a vast amount of discomfort, and frequently intense suffering."
The Astor Place restroom was an above-ground structure,
cast iron exterior walls and no heating system. Plans show a
ment" with two stalls and a washbasin; this was accessible th
containing space for the janitor. The "men's compartment," rea
outside, contained what appear to be three stalls for urination
without stall doors for privacy. A low cupola provided ventil
opened in May, 1869, and drew daily attendance of nearly 1,0
never more than 25 women. The cramped facility was largely
was cleaned only once a day. "These accommodations should b
acter, tending rather to bring up the sense of decency in the
it," clucked the Board of Health's engineer. "In an educational
kept public urinals may serve as powerful assistants to the Bo
will introduce among our lowest classes habits of cleanliness an
will improve the condition of our tenement houses." The healt
perintendent and then ceded control of the facility in 1872 to
Public Works, which proved less devoted to the project. Repo
that the building was "in too public a place," the department to
Why did women shun this early public restroom? Women of
constant presence in New York's streets, and plenty of them m
urge while in the vicinity of Astor Place. Lacking visitors, the
have stayed cleaner than the heavily used men's side. The sea
freezing in winter, posing more of a problem for women, but th

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underused even in mild weather. It's possible only working

simple dresses found the space big enough. Affluent, fashion
1870 wore crinolines that pushed out the skirt at the rear, an
wear bustles. The Astor Place stalls on the women's side were
those on the men's side, clearly too cramped for adjusting th
steel. The more serious problem, most likely, was privacy:
view of dozens or hundreds of strangers as they entered an
through an anteroom too small to effectively screen the inte
restroom was indeed "too public" for women.13
Toilet facilities were scarce in other nineteenth-century ci
stallations were small urinals for men, not necessarily c
Providence allotted $60 for building one of these in 1863; C
board voted to build "improved" ones costing $45 each. Bosto
Common as early as 1860; by 1873 it had 15 throughout
"urinal" was applied indiscriminately to one-man urinating sta
restrooms with washbasins and water closets, leaving it un
Boston's included stalls for women. City officials later pointed
tion of "women's cottages" on the Common and Public Garden
building modern toilet facilities. Boston's Board of Health p
system of public toilets in commercial streets by putting up str
one at Astor Place. An 1876 newspaper article described one
Clinton streets: "It is made of wrought iron, is 14 X 10 feet,
closets and four urinals. The exterior is ornamented with cast i
painted in different shades, making it, architectural speak
building." The Board of Health was operating 22 public urina
would have built more if neighboring property owners had let
Almost nobody wanted a public urinal - or "P.U." - ne
Fearing that the odor and appearance would repel affluent p
most valued customers, merchants opposed installing new u
city officials to get rid of established ones. Petitioners in Ea
the aldermen in 1880 to remove a brand new facility fr
Worrisome as sources of disease-bearing miasmas and distast
human waste, the urinals were also poorly maintained. Cinc
were infamously dirty and plagued each winter by bursting
newspaper reported in 1883 that Newark's public urinal had
reeks with filth and upon whose walls are written the vilest
Advocates of public restrooms downplayed these malo
when proposing new "comfort stations," and they mention
only to insist Americans could do better. They pointed inst
Royal Society of Arts had installed restrooms to serve crowd
Palace exhibition. Public acclaim for these facilities encoura
build additional ones in London after the exhibition cl
waiting rooms" charged admission to help pay attendants w
cleaned. Superior stalls were available at extra cost, segrega
from poorer ones in keeping with English concerns about c
constructed a larger system of underground public toilets in
the 1880s. By 1896, London already had 16 underground stat
New York and Boston led the way in bringing modern
United States. Civic reformers in New York took up the issu

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the mid 1890s as part of Mayor William L. Strong's Committ

Water Closets and Urinals. Strong's administration was simult
ing a street-cleaning and garbage-collecting campaign under G
Jr., and cracking down on squalid tenements and police corru
bath committee issued a report in 1897 showing that New Yo
European cities in building public bathhouses, laundries and toi
hundred thousand people in the city have no proper facilities
bodies clean is a disgrace to the city and to the civilization of
century." New York's scarcity of public urinals forced men i
mining private and public morality, the report argued.
Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt's complaint that he found
officers for entering saloons while on duty, because they had
The report's chapter on comfort stations devoted nine p
London's underground toilet rooms, detailing their architectur
fixtures, budget, fees, receipts, attendance and hours of oper
plans for a model comfort station at Greeley Square that the
baths committee hoped would prove "an object lesson to
New York ended up building its first underground comfort sta
the Post Office, near the site proposed for the City Hall Park res
before.18
The Appeal of Private Restrooms
Most nineteenth-century public facilities could not compare with the alter-
natives offered by private businesses. Privately-owned restrooms were better
screened from public gaze, offered a wider range of personal services, and openly
segregated the affluent from the poor - except in saloons. Saloons were cross-class
institutions scattered throughout the city in places convenient to where men
worked, walked home, or waited for streetcars. These democratic spaces welcomed
laboring men whose work clothes would have made them conspicuous in a
department store or hotel lobby. At noontime, many saloons offered "free lunch"
buffets of bread, cold meat, cheese, crackers, pickles, and other thirst- inducing
treats. Saloons provided the only public toilets in industrial areas, waterfronts and
residential neighborhoods, a service that saloonkeepers considered as effective as
free lunches in attracting customers.19
Other privately-owned facilities - in hotels, railroad stations and department
stores -attempted to replicate the private home in appearance and exclusivity.
First class hotels since the early nineteenth century had stayed a step ahead of all
but the richest Americans in upgrading their plumbing. Boston's Tremont House
and imitators in other cities offered indoor plumbing as part of a package of luxu-
ries that deeply impressed visitors. Nineteenth-century hotels continually in-
stalled the latest in gas lighting, elevators, heating, telephones and electricity.
Hotel restaurants, saloons, newsstands and barbershops served both the hotel
guests and the residents of the surrounding city, blurring the line between private
and public. Well-dressed people used hotel lobbies and parlors as places to meet,
loiter and people-watch, even if they were not checked in as guests. 0
Hotels allotted distinct spaces for different people and functions, replicating
in exaggerated form the divisions within fashionable homes. Many hotels offered
separate entrances for men and women. The main (or men's) entrance led to a

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commercial space designed to receive the male public, like

the street. An 1871 floor plan of the Hotel Continental in
lobby labeled "exchange," onto which opened two stores, a
rant," a saloon, a newsstand, and a large washroom for me
hotel's main desk, elevator and grand staircase. The was
water-closets, a wall of urinals and ten washbasins. These we
use; hotel guests used shared restrooms on each floor and pri
suites. Women's entrances to hotels led to more secluded par
up, with comfortable seating, carpets and drapes.21
Railroad stations and department stores, like hotels, comp
tomers with costly architecture, technological innovations a
Each of these interiors served as what the historian Perry
"anti-city." In each, commercial services lined a route of pede
concourse or aisle) that served as a reformed version of the s
erty, each retained some power to exclude tramps and other
Railroad companies in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s buil
tricked out with gothic or Italianate towers and finished ins
wood, brass and stone. They replaced many of these stations
century with even more extravagant, colonnaded monstrosit
umental gateways into the city. Far more than rooms with
benches, the terminals subdivided space for different uses a
people. A traveler could find barber shops, showers, bootblac
telephone booths, parcel check rooms, smoking rooms,
rooms for women that emphasized domestic qualities. "The l
a magnificent apartment, having tall, Gothic-arched window
tal glass, a hardwood paneled ceiling, and a great, cheery, o
mented with tiles," gushed an 1887 guide to Philadelphia in
Pennsylvania Railroad's Broad Street station. "It is very com
with settees and easy-chairs and rugs." Some stations had s
trances, ladies' lunchrooms, and private rooms for distinguish
The creation of distinct spaces, observed Walter G. Berg
for designing railroad stations, spared genteel folk from con
undesirable element, such as depot loungers, laborers, hack
etc., and in Southern sections the colored element." Some sta
select and quiet" ladies' parlor in addition to the women's wai
gave railroads "an excellent opportunity for catering to and o
of a very influential class of the travelling community." Large t
regated foreign immigrants, who arrived in their own second-c
in their own waiting rooms complete with dining, restroom and
Entrances to the toilets in turn-of-the-century stations w
direct view; women, especially, passed through a sequence of
spaces before reaching the stall. According to plans for th
station in Chicago, a woman seeking relief would walk from t
the women's waiting room, then go through an alcove to ent
room" with a bench-like seat and three washbasins; a screen
of the room blocked the view of the far side. Only as she wa
and pushed open the final door to a toilet room contain
woman's purpose unambiguous, and by that point only a few
see her. Berg warned that "it is very bad practice ... to allow

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toilet-room to lead directly from a general waiting-room." No o

women's waiting room should be able to glimpse that sacred porta
Department stores, the last of the three great semi-public s
the nineteenth century, rivaled even hotels in providing "serv
They especially served women, who formed the large majorit
Philadelphia store estimated in 1900 that women made of up 8
Selling quality goods at fixed prices, department stores had e
goods shops in the 1880s and cobbled together successively larg
Retailers in the early twentieth century constructed block-long
with acres of selling floors and a stunning array of amenities.
appeal was their success in giving shoppers the comforts of hom
comforts of the more luxurious home that shoppers liked to i
to elegant tearooms and restaurants, the big city department
ladies' parlors where a tired shopper could relax in an armcha
write a letter. An 1892 Macy's ad described a new parlor as "t
and beautiful department devoted to the comfort of ladies to
cantile establishment in the city. The style of decoration is L
expense has been spared ..." Other stores offered libraries
women could park their children, and "retiring rooms" wher
Walking through the carpeted parlor, a woman could pass
room. These too were opulent: marble-floored lavatories desig
elite women's clubs. Store employees posed as maids catering to
guests in all of these faux-domestic spaces.25
Department stores divided affluent consumers from the res
directed to welcome all visitors and treat them politely, but f
stores clearly signaled to poor people that they were out of th
stores targeted a less affluent clientele while still offering some
ties, thus helping to sort the shopping public along class lines.
ment stores in the early twentieth century further insulated aff
opening "bargain basements" to serve poorer people. As a
needing to urinate could enter a department store with confide
be shielded from contact with the poor, cosseted by attendan
use clean toilet facilities better than she had at home. Not
department store was the restroom of choice for women in th
century. In 1902, when the City of Chicago had yet to build it
comfort station, Marshall Field opened a new store with 39 atte
Health and Moral Reform
The campaign for public comfort stations expanded and changed in the early
twentieth century. Historians have long puzzled over the tangle of reform efforts
in Progressive Era cities, discerning among other themes a struggle for rational
systems of governance, middle class status anxiety, shifting coalitions of interest
groups, elite attempts at social control, efforts to end class conflict, efforts to segre-
gate society, and women's battle to save the city from misery and chaos.2 A
vantage point in the public restroom, though unglamorous, offers another angle
from which to view this era. We can discern in the comfort station an example of
how concerns about health, morality, and citizenship encouraged an expanded
government role in the intimate aspects of daily life.

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Standards of hygiene were rising in urban America at th

public space and in personal care. Streets were cleaner, thank
ans like George Waring, and in part to a shift away from hor
tion. The number of horses on city streets grew more s
companies switched to electric trolleys in the 1890s, and th
1910 as automobiles replaced carriages.28 Plumbing was p
inside middle-class urban homes by the late 1890s. Inventors
technical problems: installing good traps in the sinks, for ins
effective flush in a ceramic toilet bowl. A University of
heaped shame on homeowners still using privies: "No degre
parlor can clear a family of the charge of barbarism when it
graceful and anti-social instruments of disease and death." A
theory spread in the 1880s and 1890s, physicians and the m
aware that disease was spread not just by unhealthy environm
healthy individuals. Linked to the poor by the "socialism of t
city people felt an even greater interest in universalizing th
Schools and settlement houses taught immigrants the impo
hand-washing and tooth-brushing. Private bathrooms were in
ments. New York's Tenement House Law of 1901 mandated
include water closets in each apartment.29
Beyond their concern with disease, affluent New Yorker
cleaner streets, tenement laws, public laundries, public bath
believed that filthiness "demoralized" the poor. Physical dirt
and discouraged immigrants' assimilation into American cul
urban environment would teach poor people to reject squalo
corrupt government, and would encourage a deeper commit
ideals.30 Advocates of City Beautiful projects hoped to achi
through well-designed urban landscapes, with broad avenues a
mental public buildings. Contrasting with the competiti
districts, the orderly civic centers were supposed to awe citizen
the state and instill civic loyalty. But perhaps a clean restr
better. One good government advocate, Citizens Union
Cutting, argued in 1902 that the common man failed to app
works projects.
"On the other hand, public baths, comfort stations, small parks a
well paved and cleanly streets, lying at the very doors of the m
quently of the concern of officials for those to whom ordinarily
is something remote and apart. It is chiefly through such instru
the citizens can be made to feel the intimate regard for governm
Moreover, these instrumentalities are eminently educational -
good citizenship, for better morals, and for health."31
The civic value of public toilets thus came not simply from
up the urban environment but from their effect on the ph
personal integrity of citizens. Sanitarians and social reform
public toilets regularly noted the collective interest in helpin
their own bodies. This argument reflected a new emphasis
field, a shift of focus from filthy surroundings to unhealt

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report on the need for comfort stations, a St. Louis civic grou
cians' warnings that failure to urinate or defecate promptly
system. Similar warnings were heard over the next two decade
called for public investment in comfort stations and other mu
bacteriological laboratories, school health programs, baby clini
nies (ice being needed to keep milk from spoiling).32
More broadly, arguments about the public value of individu
Brandeis's famous brief persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court
Oregon's regulation of women's working hours. "As healthy m
to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman bec
public interest," the court declared in Muller v. Oregon . Anti-p
deployed the argument of "social hygiene" (preventing ven
prohibitionists pointed to the effects of alcoholism on the bod
venting teenage promiscuity - also couched in terms of healt
justified the expanded role of juvenile courts and sex education
advocated vigorous state intrusions into working-class family
mothers and promote child welfare, they insisted that the r
both the individual and the family. The state was not a threat
private integrity.33 The reconfiguration of private and public d
from politically active women, whose very existence challeng
thought about those concepts. As the historian Maureen A. F
in the case of Chicago, activist women launched campaigns for
housing, environmental and sanitary conditions.34
Women's groups in both small towns and big cities wor
public washrooms. Those in small towns opened what were ca
which aimed to serve farm families in town for a day of shopp
ness blocks or homes near the business district, the small-town
like domestic spaces with small toilet rooms and larger parlors
kitchens.35 Women's groups in New York, Atlanta, and other
for more narrowly defined comfort stations. Those in Chicago
as early as 1907, at a time when Chicago was conspicuous
respect, and the Woman's City Club of Chicago took up the ca
cally a few years later. That club, made up of the affluent wiv
nessmen and professionals, argued that city government sho
attend to making Chicago clean and healthy - performing on
work that women performed within the home. The club added
to a list of goals that included the municipal ownership and ope
lection. "Now that the saloons are closed on Sundays, the need
stations is most apparent. There is only one in the downtown d
club official, Jennie Franklin Purvin, in 1915. The next year t
that it would seek a city-wide system of "convenience sta
members to select proper sites in each ward and to lobby ward
construction. The club persuaded voters in 1917 to pass a $15
for building this system, and then worked with city officia
Members also monitored operation of the comfort station at W
to ensure the city discouraged loitering and to raise "the sta
Purvin complained in 1918 that Chicago was taking too lon
comfort stations, but she was pleased to see the stations gettin
one month, the station at Washington and LaSalle streets

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people, mostly men. "Maybe they would otherwise have

saloon for the convenience," she observed.36
Building comfort stations to replace saloons was one aspec
paign for municipal ownership during the Progressive Era, an
mayors in Detroit, Toledo and Cleveland, academics in C
socialists in Milwaukee and Schenectady, and civic reformers
country. One of the foremost proponents was Frederic C. H
1905 reform tract, The City : The Hope of Democracy . "Our
adding to their burdens and rapidly enlarging their function
needs of the public and the dangers of unrestrained individ
clared. Cities once had left to private initiative even such bas
tion and paving, but now municipalities collected trash, ope
employment bureaus, and inspected construction. "That the
to-day will become the public ones of to-morrow is ine
[daycare center], the kindergarten, settlement, playgrounds,
houses, hospitals were inspired by private philanthropy. The
under public control," Howe predicted. What once had
socialism was now becoming an accepted duty of society
women reformers. Pointing to the example of English c
America a bright future of municipally-run electric utilities
and streetcars - a future in which each advance of public res
a higher social conscience.37
The optimism of municipal ownership advocates echo
group of reformers: prohibitionists. They too looked forward
government would solve health problems and improve the ci
repressive side of Prohibition is what lingers in public memo
activists in the late nineteenth century had placed the fight
a larger agenda for creating a moral society. The movemen
from social and political reformers even as the narrowly f
League led the fight for national Prohibition in the 1900s an
who denounced the meatpacking, oil, and drug industrie
attacks on greedy liquor interests - "a parasitic class which h
weakness." Medical science, social justice, and economic effi
demand that government put an end to demon rum. In 191
surged to victory, settlement house leader Robert A.
Prohibition might bring the triumph of a new social spirit
ethical principle that certain phases of conduct which have
of as private and personal are, first and last, matters of invi
concern." A well-administered democracy would promote the
the selfish demands of the drunkard. Morals would improve
like prostitution could be more easily solved.38
Anti-saloon forces had noted the importance of comfort
Prohibition seemed plausible. The Committee of Fifty, a m
commissioned a study that resulted in the 1901 publication o
Saloon, written by Raymond Calkins. Soberly assessing
Calkins noted that it welcomed almost every man and offe
ship, free lunches and toilets. Reformers could undermine
Calkins suggested, by developing alternatives like coffee sho
of course comfort stations.39 Prohibitionists and their symp

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support comfort stations through the next two decades. "It i

people to enter places against their will that they may obtain
the community should furnish," insisted one Chicagoan. In the
tions of 1915, the Prohibition Party's platform called for more
and comfort stations as well as municipal ownership of utilit
service. But by the time Calkins issued a second edition of the
admitted disappointment: "The experience of these years has
preciable progress in the provision of saloon substitutes was po
saloon remained in any form whatsoever."40
Construction and Use
Following the London model, New York in the early twentieth century built
high-ceilinged, white-tiled stations at a cost of about $20,000 to $30,000 each.
Manhattan had eight comfort stations by 1905, mostly underground, and
Brooklyn had six. Boston had a large, heavily used one under the Common.
Underground stations could discreetly extend under a wide area while leaving the
surface open for park and sidewalk use. Plans for the Greeley Square station show
it filling most of the area beneath the park. Separate staircases led down to a
men's room (containing 16 toilets, 12 urinals and four sinks) and a smaller
women's room (with 12 toilets and 5 sinks). Dr. Reil M. Woodward of the U.S.
Public Health Service urged other cities to follow the modest English example
instead of installing the crudely public urinals seen on continental European
streets. In a well-designed underground station, he claimed, "one may enter and
leave without feeling the blush of shame." Of course, even though the doors into
underground restrooms could not be seen easily from street level, people were in
plain view while descending or ascending the steps.41
Cities persisted in scattering small toilet buildings through outlying parks
and playgrounds, but these did not serve the daily needs of most people. "One
cannot always remain near a park, and in winter when the kidneys are most
active, these stations are often closed," complained Woodward. Cities followed
New York and Boston in preferring large, underground comfort stations to serve the
downtown core. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh,
Seattle and Washington all built underground stations in the 1900s and 1910s.
Underground stations were also constructed in moderate-sized centers including
Toledo, Worcester, Salt Lake City, Providence, Binghamton, Hartford, Wilkes-
Barre, Scranton, and Portland (Oregon), typically at a central square in the heart of
the business district. Placing the restroom underground was such a point of civic
pride that some cities unable or unwilling to pay the high price would choose to
build no restroom at all. By 1919 nearly one hundred cities were operating some
sort of comfort station, above or below ground.42
Advocates of comfort stations felt the need grow urgent as some states closed
their saloons in advance of the rest of the nation. When Oregon's prohibition
took effect at the beginning of 1916, hotels and stores in Portland complained
that people were constantly asking to use the toilet. The Oregon State Hotel
Association, backed by downtown merchants, asked the city to build four addi-
tional comfort stations to spare private business the cost and nuisance. The city
agreed to build one. Ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment in January, 1919,
confronted cities across the nation with the imminent need for more substitutes

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for the saloon. The president of the Woman's City Club

DeKoven Bowen, warned that "7,000 comfort stations will be p
and some provision should be made for the comfort of both
She observed that city officials were dragging their feet. Chic
had only five comfort stations to serve the entire Loop, and h
the money it had allotted to build more. As the public throng
restrooms in the 1920s, hotels and stores became less welcom
stalled coin-locks on stalls, while some department stores eli
nished parlors and left only austere toilet rooms.43
Public officials roused themselves for a final flurry of constr
1920s. In addition to Portland and Chicago, other cities openin
tions between 1919 and 1921 included Allentown, Atlanta, De
Lansing (Michigan), Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and San Fr
passed a law in 1919 requiring every municipality in the stat
toilets. The state's biggest city, Milwaukee, had energetically
projects and public health programs, thanks to the efforts of
ment workers and socialist politicians. But the "sewer socialism
not extend to small towns where officials grumbled at even t
Though municipalities could simply allow public use of a restr
or police station, fewer than half the villages and cities in W
plied with the law by 192 7. 44
Placed in prominent public spaces downtown, comfort
serve all citizens equally, unlike public baths built in poor neig
these years. Men and women were assigned separate rooms, but o
was treated as a collection of interchangeable individuals, ent
private stalls and equally dignified with the titles of ladies an
Cosgrove, a plumbing expert writing on the subject, urged that a
prohibited from accepting tips or selling toiletries, in order "tha
treated alike."45 Southern cities did segregate the races. Dallas, fo
underground restroom in 1915 with separate sections for white
opened one in 1921 with a room for white women on the secon
on the first floor, and blacks in the basement. Baltimore's facilit
divided by the 1920s. But this was not the practice in Norther
comfort stations were located.46
Virtually everyone who wrote about the subject agreed th
dants were essential to successful restrooms. Department store
ed the closest supervision and drew few complaints. Large ra
typically had porters or other attendants for each washroom, ma
trances to women's waiting rooms, and Traveler's Aid Society
road police circulating through the station. But terminals re
open to the city and drew heavy use by men; one Chicago stati
ceived over 7,000 visitors a day, according to a 1908 report. S
were sometimes trashed by sloppy visitors and stripped of brass
"The passenger who may be a model of tidiness at home b
public place," sighed a writer to the Railroad Gazette . Condit
the small, poorly attended restrooms that transit companies i
the subways and elevated lines. There were about 800 of t
alone by 1919, half for men and half for women. Health inspe
the transit companies to clean them up and supervise them.

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stations, by a portion of our traveling public, is a sad commen

of some people, and an example of their lack of consideration
others," the health department stated in its 1920 report.47 Per
learn better habits eventually, some public officials hoped, bu
an unattended washroom invited trouble. The room itself would be vandalized
and befouled, and visitors would be easy targets for muggers.48
City-owned restrooms attempted to replicate the policies pioneered by their
more successful competitors. Comfort stations were usually attended during all
hours of operation, often by men and women in uniform, yet even that did not
guarantee good behavior by the diverse crowd. Supervision stopped at the stall
door, protecting the bodily privacy of civilized men and women but hobbling the
state's power to control deviant behavior. Theft and vandalism inside the men's
room stalls at Wilkes-Barre's comfort station grew so extreme by 1914 that the
city planned to replace the doors with smaller ones so that the staff could look in.
Cleveland's parks superintendent went farther, ordering stall doors at Public
Square removed on both the men's and women's sides. Women had been clogging
the pipes by trying to flush foreign objects - probably menstrual cloths, which
some women had habitually dropped down the privy hole. The removal of their
stall doors outraged Cleveland women. "It is a disgrace to decency that women
who are compelled to use the comfort station in the very heart of the city should
be forced to face embarrassment by being deprived of privacy in the station," sput-
tered Anna Herbruck of the Federation of Women's Clubs.4
Public men's rooms concealed additional abuses. As early as the 1890s, op-
portunities for public privacy drew homosexual activity to toilet rooms. Despite
the risk of arrest, the chance of quick, anonymous encounters appealed both
to openly gay men and outwardly straight men with homosexual inclinations.
Comfort stations began to develop a negative image as immoral and perhaps
dangerous places. A 1912 sex education book warned that "Boys should not be
allowed to frequent public toilets, for many perverts watch these places and entice
boys into submitting to their desires." City officials in Hartford worried that
homosexuality and child molesting in park restrooms would give the parks them-
selves a bad reputation.50
Concerns about inadequate privacy, safety and cleanliness discouraged many
people - particularly women - from using public comfort stations. While the
clean, private restrooms at the department store enveloped the act of excretion in
a comforting atmosphere of personal care, public comfort stations stirred up feel-
ings of humiliation and revulsion. The approach to the building's door or stairway
stood in plain view in one of the city's busiest spots, with men sometimes loitering
around the women's entrance in what may have been deliberate act of provoca-
tion. Women avoided the more secluded restrooms, such as in parks, for safety
reasons. A public restroom even at its cleanest is a place associated with symboli-
cally potent contamination, and these comfort stations were not always clean.
Women who were expected to embody higher standards of hygiene entered to
the smell of stale air, the feel of damp tiles underfoot, and the sight of litter and
clogged washbasins. A growing fear of germs added to their squeamishness.
Physicians in the early twentieth century warned that toilet seats could spread in-
testinal and venereal disease, and that the roller towels in some restrooms smeared
germs from hand to hand. Though acceptance of germ theory had undercut belief
in a link between bad smells and disease, physicians and the public feared poorly

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ventilated rooms as nests of microbes. "With every passing y

preciate more keenly that fresh air means health, and the ab
observed the writer of a housekeeping manual.51 The mixin
deeper problem that no amount of disinfectant and fresh a
growing awareness of germ transmission shifted public fears fr
the environment to the infectious potential of individuals, p
migrants. People who were aware of the "socialism of the mic
municipal efforts to promote public health, but they didn'
occupy a stall beside a slum dweller. What was intended
privacy was haunted by awareness of strangers' bodies.52
Women avoided the uncertain sanitation and mixed crowd of comfort sta-
tions when they could. Restrooms in hotels, stores and railroad stations served
people who had other legitimate reasons for being in the building - dining, shop-
ping or waiting for a train - or who looked like they might. Comfort stations
served whoever happened to be out in the street, rich or poor. They were obvious-
ly important for the heavily male population that worked in the streets, including
teamsters, peddlers and policemen. Anyone else, feeling the necessity while trav-
eling from one interior to another, had more of a choice: couldn't she just hold it
till she got where she was going? Women made up only 15 to 20 percent of visi-
tors to public comfort stations in the early twentieth century. They were 12% of
the daily crowd of 4,000 people at each of two stations in Washington in 1907,
and that proportion had risen only to 16% by 1920, when the city's four comfort
stations were serving a daily total of over 36,000 people. For that reason, cities
commonly made the women's side of the comfort station smaller and put fewer
fixtures there. The extra space was sometimes allotted to an "emergency room"
for women unfortunate enough to go into labor or experience some other
medical emergency in such a place. The men's side of the comfort station often
kept later hours, as more men than women felt comfortable being out on the
streets at night.53
The expense of attending and maintaining comfort stations helped discour-
age extensive construction. Underground stations in particular were plagued by
malfunctioning plumbing and moisture leakage through the walls. Pumps were
needed to raise wastewater up to the level of the sewer lines. When these malfunc-
tioned, toilets and sinks would back up, forcing the comfort station to close until
the problem could be fixed and the mess cleaned up.54 Comfort stations typically
cost about $6,000 a year to attend and maintain, though the price varied; Detroit
officials reported in 1921 that each of theirs cost a staggering $15,000 a year.
Chicago city councilmen at one point refused to build stations that would not be
self-supporting, an impossible condition. Public officials and reformers in the
1920s looked to offset the cost through fees and concessions. Though charging
someone to use the toilet seemed inconsistent with the goals of promoting public
health and undermining the saloon, railway terminals had developed a compro-
mise: giving visitors the option of paying for larger stalls with washbasins.
Washington was among many cities following this practice; its revenues covered
about a quarter of the operating cost of the stations. Cleveland women had sug-
gested that pay stalls could be given "special care" - a solution that would satisfy
those willing to pay for greater cleanliness but undermine the goal of equal provi-
sion for all citizens. Concessions seemed another promising approach; news
vendors and shoeshine men would pay to set up shop in a place guaranteed to

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get heavy foot traffic. In smaller comfort stations they mig

attendants.55
Cities never came anywhere near replicating the convenient, widespread
system of accessible toilets offered by saloons. Political pressure for more restrooms
waned in the 1920s once the Prohibition movement triumphed and the move'
ment for municipal ownership faded away. Despite initial warnings that
Prohibition would create a urinary crisis, people made do with the limited
number of comfort stations and the increasing private alternatives. The larger
trend of municipal ownership stalled for multiple reasons: fears of political corrup-
tion, the decline of the socialist movement, legal limits on municipal finance,
and court rulings limiting municipal authority. Court rulings upholding privacy
rights in the 1920s narrowly construed privacy as protection from the state -
rather different from Progressive reformers, expansive view of privacy as a guaran-
tee of personal dignity. Indirectly, these changes undercut the philosophical argu-
ment about public responsibility that had kept calls for toilets from seeming
unimportant or ridiculous. All proponents had left was a vague language of duty
and shame about bodily management, and this language seemed to have lost its
political efficacy as middle-class norms of cleanliness were broadly accepted. It is
tempting to draw a connection between the decline of the comfort station cam-
paign in the 1920s and women's surprisingly diminished political influence after
achieving suffrage, but women themselves lost interest in the matter. The affluent
members of the Chicago Woman's City Club don't seem to have regularly used
the facilities that their activism produced; club leaders had to urge them to make
visits so that the club could track conditions. By 1922, the club acknowledged it
had become "active only sporadically" in campaigning for comfort stations, and
that no other group in Chicago was taking up the cause.56 Physicians and public
health officials also retreated from advocating sanitary facilities, and from other
social reforms that benefitted the less affluent. "In the conservative climate of the
1920s, it was more congenial to think in terms of public health surveillance than
to advocate social transformation," observes the historian Nancy Tomes.
Meanwhile, health officials criticized what they considered a misguided insistence
on privacy as they expanded their official tracking of people with venereal diseases
(particularly poor people and racial minorities). Personal privacy ceased to be a
public priority.
Epilogue: The Decline of Public Privacy
By 1932, in the depths of the Depression, the Woman's City Club of

New York published a bleak assessment of what their city had accomplished.
"The community has failed in its manifest duty to make provision for the normal
needs of its ever increasing population," the club concluded, after surveying the
city's facilities. "Although the United States prides itself on its reputation of
being foremost in its attention to all matters related to plumbing and toilets, yet
in this question of municipal comfort stations New York has lagged far behind the
practice of European capitals." The report acknowledged that the city had in-
stalled 21 comfort stations in the Bronx since 1925. But it complained that
Brooklyn still had only seven stations outside of the parks and Coney Island.
Staten Island had three stations and Queens one (not counting Rockaway
Beach). Manhattan had 22 stations, nine of them fairly new, but restrooms were

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scarce in the densely settled lower east and west sides. Manh
rooms drew heavy use; a 1927 count had found they served m
people a day. The report called for a system of modern new
nowledged that it would be challenging to get money in a
retrenchment.58
Public priorities were shifting. Federal public works proje
created numerous restrooms in outlying parks and along highw
expand the system in city centers.59 Parks officials through
century preferred developing peripheral parks to upgrading to
squares. Comfort stations gradually deteriorated. Now that alm
unit contained a bathroom, the 40-year-old stations had l
"teach people the value of sanitation and the desirability of ha
fixtures in their homes," as a plumbing journal had hoped in
that had guided their construction - to instill healthy habits
dignity, and advance the public good over private greed
quaint. Comfort stations remained expensive to operate and
targets for cost-cutting municipalities. Public authorities in
taken on the responsibility of maintaining transit systems an
dysfunctional toilets. It would prove too heavy a burden to bea
eth century, a time of budget crises, retreat from urban publi
cism about government's ability to provide basic services. Af
less willing to pay for public amenities and more inclined to s
lectivity into private privilege.60
A surge in vandalism combined with fiscal crises in the 1
shut down many of the remaining public toilets. The experi
serves as an example. Connecticut's capital city had built a la
at State House Square in the late 1910s, and a smaller one at
the early 1920s in response to Prohibition. Expensive to opera
ground stations nevertheless remained in service into the 196
to move to the suburbs and the racial composition of the city
closed the South Green station in 1963 and State House Sq
save money. The deputy mayor claimed the State House Squa
mostly for homosexual activity; other officials said it was pla
and so crime- infested that it could not be used at night. Ne
trend-setter for twentieth-century restroom construction, also
vices in response to vandalism and fiscal woes. The majority o
shut down in the early 1980s, and conditions in the rest wer
even in city officials' judgment.61
The large, underground comfort stations of the early twen
almost all gone now throughout the United States. City pede
forced to rely on facilities in semi-private buildings such as ho
rants, and coffee shops. Instead of a right conferred by governm
bodily privacy is a purchasable commodity. Even if provided f
use of the toilet is understood to be the result of an agreemen
vidual and a business. It is an awkward, grudging agreement
ments of the individual's social status.62
By 1980, the humor columnist Art Buchwald discerned "a c
foot to prevent a majority of people in this country from empty
With public facilities shutting down, private business owners

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the parade of strangers looking to use their restrooms. Buch

own frantic search one day in Midtown Manhattan. After be
an office building, a bookstore and a hotel, he found relief in a
"I went in and said to the bartender, 'Give me a drink.'

" 'What kind of a drink?'
" 'Who cares?' I said. 'Where's the men's room?"'63
Endnotes
Address correspondence to Peter C. Baldwin, Department of History, University of
Connecticut, Storrs, CT 06269-2103. Email: peter.baldwin@uconn.edu.
1. Henry M. Hyde, "Saloons Provide Facilities for Public Comfort," Chicago Tribune, June
10, 1913, p. 1; Allen Steven, "To B.L.K.," (Chicago) Day Book, Nov. 24, 1915, p. 22.
2. Charles Zueblin, American Municipal Progress, rev. ed. (New York, 1922), 401; Daniel
Eli Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York
City (Urbana: 2006); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-19 20
(Cambridge, MA, 1978), 200-201, 220-224.
3. On the different meanings of privacy, see Kirsten S. Rambo, " Trivial Complaints ": The
Role of Privacy in Domestic Violence Law and Activism in the U.S. (New York, 2009); Ruth
H. Bloch, "The American Revolution, Wife Beating, and the Emergent Value of Privacy,"
Early American Studies 5 (Fall 2007), 223-251; Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis,
"The Right to Privacy [The Implicit Made Explicit]," in Ferdinand David Schoeman,
Philosophical Dimensions of Privacy: An Anthology (Cambridge, U.K., 1984), at 77. Patricia
Boling discusses the connection between privilege and privacy in Privacy and the Politics of
Intimate Life (Ithaca, 1996).
4. For an overview of the early scholarship on "separate spheres" see Linda K. Kerber,
"Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,"
Journal of American History 75 (Jun. 1988), 9-39. Subsequent scholarship has continued to
complicate the history of separate spheres, showing the creative uses that women made of
the concept and documenting an abundant female presence both in public space and in
public discourse. See Mary Ryan, Women in Public : Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-
1880 (Baltimore, 1992); Julie Roy Jeffrey, "Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women
and Separate Spheres," Journal of the Early Republic 21 (Spring, 2001), 79-93; Sarah
Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York,
2002); Sharon E. Wood, The Freedom of the Streets: Work, Citizenship, and Sexuality in a
Gilded Age City (Chapel Hill, 2005).
5. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, "'The Solitude of Self: Stanton Appeals for Women's Rights,"
History Matters , George Mason University, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5315/;
Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good
City, 1871-1933 (Princeton, 2002).
6. Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic
(New Haven, 2008), 42; "Mr. Owl," The Owl, July 10, 1830; Report of the Council of
Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizens' Association of New York Upon the Sanitary
Condition of the City (New York, 1866), 76, 143, 145, 151, 290.
7. Maureen Ogle, All the Modem Conveniences : American Household Plumbing, 1840-1890
(Baltimore, 1996), 72; Frances Anne Kemble, Records of Later Life (London, 1882), 158-
59; Thomas J. Schlereth, "Conduits and Conduct: Home Utilities in Victorian America,"
in Jessica H. Foy and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds., American Home Life, 1880-1930: A Social
History of Spaces and Services (Knoxville, 1992), 254; "Nuisances," Weekly Rake, July 9,
1842; "Lowell," Life in Boston, and New England Police Gazette , June 28, 1851; "Important

109.253.201.203 on Fri, 23 Jun 2023 10:06:42 +00:00
Sanitary Suggestions," New York Times , April 20, 1862; George

Diary of George Templeton Strong: Young Man in New York , 1835
Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York, 1952), 122; "la
T. Viennot, "A Public Improvement," New York Tribune , Jan. 2
Means of Improving the Sanitary Condition of Chicago," Chicag
(Dec. 1865), 705-12; Report of the Council of Hygiene, 141, "disgus
8. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in Amer

to the Present (Baltimore, 2000), 91; George E. Waring, Jr., U
Interior, Census Office, Report on the Social Statistics of Cities , Part
Middle States (1886; New York, 1970), e.g., 36, 166, 304, 403; Ogl
esp. 73; John E Kasson, Rudeness & Civility: Manners in Nineteenth
(New York, 1990), 124-26; Nancy Tomes, The Gospel of Germs :
Microbe in American Life (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 63.
9. Ogle, Modem Conveniences ; Melosi, Sanitary City, 91-97; Warin

Statistics of Cities , Part I, 568-587.
10. Melosi, Sanitary City, 58-67.
11. Report of the Council of Hygiene, 141; "Public Urinals," New

1854; Viennot, "A Public Improvement"; "An Urgent Public Necess
Jan. 21, 1859; "The Proposed Public Urinals," New York Times,
Health," New York Herald, Sept. 11, 1868; "Board of Health," New
1868; Third Annual Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health of the
(Albany, 1868), 34-35.
12. Third Annual Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health, plat
Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations by the Mayor's Comm
(New York, 1897), 143-44.
13. Doreen Yarwood, Fashion in the Western World, 1500-1990
103,112-114.
14. "City Council," Providence Evening Press, Feb. 10, 1863; "Board
Daily Gazette, May 24, 1871; Moritz Bacharach, "Improvement
Patent No. 98905, Jan. 8, 1870, <www.google.com/patents/US
Boston Daily Advertiser , May 8, 1860; "State Charges," Boston Glo
Annual Report of the City Planning Board for the Year Ending Ja
1919), 12; "City Government Meetings: Boston Board of Aldermen
21, 1874; "City Government Meetings: Boston Board of Aldermen,
28, 1874; quotation from "Public Urinals," Boston Journal, March
Health," Boston Globe, July 7, 1880.
15. "P.U." quotation in "City Matters," Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, J

against the Board of Health," Boston Journal, Sept. 20, 1875; "City
Boston Board of Aldermen," Boston Journal, Aug. 10, 1880; "Board
Daily Advertiser, Nov. 2, 1880; "Board of Improvements," Cincinnat
1872; "Board of Health," Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, June 23, 1875; S
The Nations UnhealthiestCity, 1832-1895 (New Brunswick, NJ, 198
16. Clara Greed, Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets (Oxford, 2

copy of a letter dated Feb. 27, 1896 from the commissioners of sew
Baths Committee papers, William L. Strong administration subje
Municipal Archives.
17. Charles V. Chap in, M.D., Municipal Sanitation in the United St
808; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham : A History of
(New York, 1999), 1193-1201.

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18. Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations , 9, 142-58, es

lesson" quotation from William Gaston Hamilton to William L. Stro
7, 1896, Public Baths Committee papers; "First Public Comfort Statio
June 24, 1897, p. 4; "Reforms Come to Stay," New York Times , Nov. 1
19. Jon M. Kingsdale, "The 'Poor Man's Club': Social Functi

Working-Class Saloon," American Quarterly 25 (Oct. 1973), 472-48
Substitutes for the Saloon: An Investigation Originally Made for the Comm
edition (1919; New York, 1971), 3-19; Royal Loren Melendy, "Substit
Independent , April 25, 1901, 943; Charles Barnes, The Longshorem
21.
20. Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations , 143; Daniel Boorstin, The Americans :
The National Experience (New York, 1965), 135-41; Molly W. Berger, Hotel Dreams:
Luxury , Technology, and Urban Ambition in America, 1829-1929 (Baltimore, 2011), 27-28,
45-46, 57, 78.
21. Berger, Hotel Dreams , 99-103, 126-27, floor plan on 100; Glossop's Street Guide,
Strangers' Directory and Hotel Manual of Chicago, 7th ed. (Chicago, 1883), 38, 40-43,
45,49.
22. Perry R. Duis, Challenging Chicago, Coping with Everyday Life, 1837-1920 (Urbana,
1998), 16-17,35-39.
23. Laura Elaine Milsk, "Meet Me at the Station: The Culture and Aesthetics of Chicago's
Railroad Terminals, 1871-1930," (Ph.D. dissertation, Loyola University, Chicago, 2003);
John Henry Hepp, IV, The Middle-Class City: Transforming Space and Time in Philadelphia,
1876-1926 (Philadelphia, 2003), 60-66, esp. 65; John A. Droege, Passenger Terminals and
Trains (New York, 1916), 20, 29.
24. Walter G. Berg, Buildings and Structures of American Railroads: A Reference Book for
Railroad Managers, Superintendents, Master Mechanics, Engineers, Architects, and Students
(New York, 1893), 281, 346-47; "Central Station at Twelfth Street, Chicago, Illinois
Central Railroad," Railroad Gazette , Oct. 14, 1892, 760.
25. Hepp, Middle-Class City, 79; Ralph M. Hower, History ofMacys of New York, 1858-
1919: Chapters in the Evolution of the Department Store (Cambridge, MA, 1943), 284;
Robert W. Twyman, History of Marshall Field & Co., 1852-1906 (Philadelphia, 1954),
123-125; Lloyd Wendt and Herman Kogan, Give the Lady What She Wants ! The Story of
Marshall Field & Company (Chicago, 1952), 280-81.
26. Twyman, History of Marshall Field, 124-27; Hepp, Middle-Class City, 158-60; Hyde,
"Saloons Provide Facilities for Public Comfort"; "Underground Lavatories," Chicago
Tribune, Jan. 24, 1902, p. 12.
27. Daniel T. Rodgers, "In Search of Progressiv ism," Reviews in American History 10 (Dec.
1982), 113-132; Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive
Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York, 2003); Daphne Spain, How Women Saved
the City (Minneapolis, 2001).
28. Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth
Century (Baltimore, 2007), 16, 174-76.
29. Suellen Hoy, Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (New York, 1995), 87-
117; quotation from C. R. Henderson, The Social Spirit in America (Meadville, PA, 1897),
75; George M. Price, Handbook on Sanitation . A Manual of Theoretical and Practical
Sanitation , 2nd ed. (New York, 1905), 120; Tomes, Gospel of Germs, 92, 128.
30. Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations, 13; Burnstein, Next to Godliness .

109.253.201.203 on Fri, 23 Jun 2023 10:06:42 +00:00
31. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order , 252-276; William H. Wil
Movement (Baltimore, 1989), 91-93; "Citizens' Union Urges Exp
Times , Oct. 11, 1902, p. 16.
32. "Citizens' Union Urges Expenditures"; J. J. Cosgrove, "Comfo

Utility," American City , Feb. 1917, 180; Frank R. King, "Public
State and Municipal Necessity," Domestic Engineering , April 2, 1
Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York, 1982), 136,
of Germs , 237-40; Public Comfort Stations for Saint Louis, 10; P
Bulletin of the Department of Public Welfare, City of Chicago (Chi
W. Simons, Jr., "More Public Convenience Stations Needed," Ame
471; W.T. Sedgwick, "American Achievements and American Fail
Work," Science n.s. 42 (Sept. 17, 1915), 363; Gail Radford, "From
Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of Ameri
Journal of American History 90 (Dec. 2003), 874-77.
33. U.S. Supreme Court, Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412 (1908) http:/
cases/federal/us/208/412/case.html; Jonathan Hafetz, "A Man's
Reflections on the Home, the Family, and Privacy During the Lat
Twentieth Centuries," William and Mary Journal of Women and
Jeffrey P. Moran, "'Modernism Gone Mad': Sex Education Com
Journal of American History 83 (Sept. 1996), 481-513; Christophe
City: The White Slavery Scare and Social Governance in the Prog
Quarterly 57 (June 2005), 411-437.
34. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, '"The Solitude of Self: Stanton A

Rights," History Matters , George Mason University, http://historyma
Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts, 10.
35. "Rest Room Now a Fact," Olympia Morning Olympian, Dec. 1, 19

Clark, "Dual-purpose Rest Room," American City, July 1920, 62;
Rest Room Proves Popular," American City, June 1921, 627;
"Municipal Rest Rooms," Survey, April 22, 1922, 115-16.
36. L.C. Green, "Public Comfort Station," Atlanta Constitution
Edward N. Pearson, "City Rest Rooms," American City, Jul
Organizations Favor Public Comfort Stations," Chicago Tribune, No
tled item, Chicago Broad Ax, Nov. 1, 1913, p. 3; Flanagan, Seei
chap. 5; Woman's City Club Bulletin, Nov. 1915, Sept. 1916, Oct.
1917, Oct. 1917, April 1918, Aug. 1918, Sept. 1922, Woman's
Papers, Special Collections, University of Illinois at Chicago ("de
Sept. 1917 bulletin); "Woman's City Club Indorses 5 Bond Issu
March 29, 1917, p. 13.
37. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings : Social Politics in a Prog
MA, 1998), 132-52; Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope of Dem
esp. 26, 27 and 129. See also Zueblin, American Municipal Progress ; H
in America; R. Fulton Cutting, "Public Ownership and the Social
Times, April 1, 1900, p. 25.
38. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 81-88; Michael A. Lerner, Dry Ma

New York City (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 21-24; James H. Timberla
Progressive Movement, 1900-1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 50-
"Prohibition and Social Hygiene," Journal of Social Hygiene 5 (Apri
39. Raymond Calkins, Substitutes for the Saloon: An Investigation O

Committee of Fifty, second edition (1919; New York, 1971); Royal L
in Chicago," American Journal of Sociology 6 (Nov., 1900), 299.

109.253.201.203 on Fri, 23 Jun 2023 10:06:42 +00:00
40. Frank Guynn, "Comfort Stations," Chicago Day Book, Oct.

"Prohibitionists Nominate," Day Book , Dec. 8, 1914, p. 28; Calkins, S
Saloon, iv.
41. John K. Allen, "Public Comfort Stations," Western Architect , Dec. 1908, 75; "What it
Costs to Maintain Public Comfort Stations," Domestic Engineering , April 2, 1921, 11;
Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations , plate opposite 148, 150; Reil
M. Woodward, "Plea for Comfort Stations," Survey , April 19, 1913, 125.
42. Woodward, "Plea for Comfort Stations," 125; Frederick L. Ford, Public Comfort Stations
(Hartford, 1907); Allen, "Public Comfort Stations," 75; William Paul Gerhard, "Public
Comfort Stations: Their Location, Plan, Construction, Equipment and Care," American
City, May 1916, 449-57; Street Improvement Committee of the Civic League, Public
Comfort Stations for Saint Louis (St. Louis, 1908); Seattle Board of Park Commissioners,
Ninth Annual Report of the Board of Park Commissioners for the Calendar Year 1912 (Seattle,
n.d.), 61; "Underground Comfort Stations," Technical World Magazine, Oct. 1913, 250;
"Salt Lake's Latest Proof of Progress," Salt Lake City Evening Telegram, Oct. 18, 1913, p. 8;
"Comfort Station will be Opened in a Few Days," Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, Dec. 16,
1913. p. 4; Charles Mulford Robinson, Better Binghamton : A Report to the Mercantile-Press
Club of Binghamton, N.Y. , September, 1911 (Binghamton, 1911), 69; "The Need for Building
Public Convenience Stations," American Architect, June 16, 1920, 773-76; "Rest Room Soon
Ready," Portland Morning Oregonian, Sept. 8, 1913, p. 10; G. Burnap, "Park Utilities,"
American City , Nov. 1915, 374; Fifth Annual Report of the City Planning Board, 1 1 .
43. Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the Department of Parks and Boulevards, City of Detroit
Michigan, July 1st, 1915 to June 30, 1916 Inclusive (n.p), 21; "Hotels Seek Relief," Portland
Morning Oregonian, Oct. 14, 1916, p. 18; "Firemen Allowed One Day Off in Five,"
Oregonian, Nov. 1, 1916, 7; Cosgrove, "Comfort Stations as a Public Utility," 180-81;
Frank Crane, "A Substitute for the Saloon," American City, July 1919, 77; Woman s City
Club Bulletin, May 1919; "Public Comfort Stations," Chicago Broad Ax, Aug. 16, 1919,
p. 5; "Questionnaire Shows that Stores Need More Toilet Conveniences," Domestic
Engineering, April 2, 1921, 20; Women's City Club of New York, Comfort Stations in
New York City: Today and Tomorrow (New York, 1932), 29-30.
44. "Nation-wide Survey of Public Comfort Station Situation," Domestic Engineering, April
2, 1921, 5-6; Frank R. King, "Wisconsin First State to Pass Public Comfort Station Law
and Adopt Uniform Code," Domestic Engineering, April 2, 1921: 18; Judith Walzer Leavitt,
The Healthiest City: Milwaukee and the Politics of Health Reform (Princeton, 1982); Graham
Romeyn Taylor, "The Socialists in Milwaukee," Survey, March 30 1912, pp. 1996-99;
Frank R. King, "Public Comfort Stations," American City, Dec. 1925, 613-619; The
Wisconsin Blue Book, 1927 (Madison, 1927), 253.
45. Like comfort stations, though, public baths isolated individuals in private stalls.
Andrea Renner, "A Nation That Bathes Together: New York City's Progressive Era Public
Baths," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 67 (Dec. 2008), 504-531; J.J.
Cosgrove, Plumbing Plans and Specifications (Pittsburgh, 1910), quotation at 264, plans at
263 and 266.
46. "Comfort Station Completed," Dallas MorningNews, Aug. 2, 1915, p. 14; "New Public
Comfort Station Open Monday," Atlanta Constitution , Jun 18, 1921; "Pastors Inquire Into
Jim Crow Comfort Stations," Baltimore Afro-Americany March 2, 1929.
47. Simons, "More Public Convenience Stations Needed," 473-74; Droege, Passenger
Terminals, 26; Ex-Hayseed, "Tidiness in Railroad Stations," Railroad Gazette, March 24,
1 893, 219; Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of New York for the Calendar
Year 1919 (New York, 1920), 30; Annual Report of the Department of Health of the City of
New York for the Calendar Year 1 920 (New York, 1921 ), 54.

109.253.201.203 on Fri, 23 Jun 2023 10:06:42 +00:00
48. Charles M. Fassett, Assets of the Ideal City (New York, 1922),
"Standards for Public Comfort Stations," Domestic Engineering , Oct
49. Simons, "More Public Convenience Stations Needed," 473-74

in Comfort Station," Wilkes-Barre Times Leader , Feb. 23, 1914, p. 3
Women Dirty," Cleveland Plain Dealer , March 7, 1914, p. 2; Lara Fr
Period: Menstruation in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore, 200
50. J.J. Cosgrove, "Public Comfort Station Failures," in Proceedings , 1

Meetings , The American Society of Sanitary Engineering (Cincin
Chauncey, Gay New York , Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making
1890-1940 (New York, 1994), 196-200; E.B. Lowry, M.D., and Rich
Himself: Talks with Men Concerning Themselves (Chicago, 1912)
Domesticating the Street: The Reform of Public Space in Hartford,
1999), 131.
51. "Police Court News," Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, March 18, 1914, p. 21; Cosgrove,
"Standards for Public Comfort Stations," 11; "What of Comfort Stations?" Kansas City
Times, Feb. 22, 1919, p.4; Ruth Barcan, "Dirty Spaces: Separation, Concealment, and
Shame in the Public Toilet," in Harvey Molotch and Laura Norén, eds., Toilet:
Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing (New York, 2010), 25; "Find Rest Rooms
for Women Dirty"; C.M. Hilliard, "Public Toilets, Public Drinking Fountains and
Public Spitting in Relation to the Conservation of Human Life, Proceedings of the
Indiana Academy of Science, 1913 (Indianapolis, 1914), 220; Benjamin C. Gruenberg, High
Schools and Sex Education: A Manual of Suggestions on Education Related to Sex
(Washington, 1922), 61-62; Virginia Terhune Van De Water, From Kitchen to Garret
(New York, 1912), 90.
52. Tomes, Gospel of Germs, 239; Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers : Germs, Genes, and the
Immigrant Menace (New York, 1994).
53. Cosgrove, Plumbing Plans , 255-56; Gerhard, "Public Comfort Stations," 452; A.R.
McGonegal, "Cost and Maintenance of Public Convenience Stations in Washington, D.
C.," Domestic Engineering, April 2, 1921, 25; Fifth Annual Report of the City Planning Board ,
13-15.
54. Cosgrove, "Public Comfort Station Failures"; Simons, "More Public Convenience
Stations Needed."
55. "What it Costs to Maintain Public Comfort Stations," Domestic Engineering, April 2,
1921, 10-11; Woman's City Club Bulletin, April 1919; "Prohibition Emphasizes the Need
of Public Comfort Stations," Ohio Public Health Journal, Jan. 1917, 39-40; "Find Rest
Rooms Dirty"; McGonegal, "Cost and Maintenance of Public Convenience Stations in
Washington"; Simons, "More Public Convenience Stations Needed," 472.
56. Radford, "From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities," 873; Rambo, "Trivial
Complaints ", 8-9, 54-55, 66; Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and
American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review 89 (Jun., 1984), 620-
647; [Chicago] Woman's City Club Bulletin, Dec. 1917, quotation from Sept. 1922.
57. Tomes, Gospel of Germs, 241; Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer and James Colgrove,
Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America (Berkeley, CA, 2007),
chap. 3.
58. Women's City Club, Comfort Stations in New York City, 7-9, 16-24.
59. New York City Park Department, Eighteen Years of Progress, 1934-1952 (New York,
1952); Rebecca Webber, "Public Toilets," GothamGazette.com, July 15, 2001.

109.253.201.203 on Fri, 23 Jun 2023 10:06:42 +00:00
60. "Progress in Public Comfort Station Construction," Domestic Engin

and Heating Weekly, April 2, 1921; "Appeals to the Public," New Yo
1943, p. 17; John C. Teaford, The Rough Road to Renaissance: Urb
America , 1940-1985 (Baltimore, 1990), 102, 218-231; Kevin Kruse, W
and the Making of Modem Conservatism (Princeton, 2005), 234-58. Je
an analogous withdrawal in the 1960s and 1970s from municipal swim
place where middle-class people felt a distasteful bodily intimacy w
racial minorities; Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimm
(Chapel Hill, 2007), 179-205.
61. "Seek Big Vote on House of Comfort," Hartford Courant, April
End Asks Comfort Station," Courant, July 26 1922, p. 9; "Do Not Clos
3, 1935, p. 6; "Comfort Stations," Courant, March 31, 1963, p. 2
Council," Courant, Feb. 22, 1970, p. 3B; Garret Condon and Nanc
Nature Calls, Finding Place to Go Can be Tricky," Courant, April 2
Millones and Murray Schumach, "The Changing City: Tide of Po
Times, June 4, 1969, p. 1; "Manhattan Restrooms: An Elusive Amen
1988, pp. CI, C10; Council of the City of New York, Toilet Trauma:
Restrooms in New York City (New York, 2001 ).
62. Felicia R. Lee, "The Homeless Sue for Toilets in New York," T
p. Bl; Vicki Rovere, Where to Go: A Guide to Manhattan s Toilet
Webber, "Public Toilets"; "Restrooms in New York" <NYrestroom.co
63. Art Buchwald, "Brother, Can You Spare a John?" Newsweek, Feb.

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Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932

Author(s): Peter C. Baldwin

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43306014

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Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities,

Journal of Social History vol. 48 no. 2 (2014), pp. 264-288

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Chicagoan. "Why are we compelled to run the gauntlet past th

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natural place were the secluded domestic interior, and their m

Sanitation and Public Urinals in the Nineteenth Century

Concerns about public sanitation motivated early efforts to install public

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The stench of feces and rotting garbage was nauseating even

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underused even in mild weather. It's possible only working

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the mid 1890s as part of Mayor William L. Strong's Committ

The Appeal of Private Restrooms

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commercial space designed to receive the male public, like

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toilet-room to lead directly from a general waiting-room." No o

Health and Moral Reform

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Standards of hygiene were rising in urban America at th

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people, mostly men. "Maybe they would otherwise have

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support comfort stations through the next two decades. "It i

Construction and Use

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for the saloon. The president of the Woman's City Club

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stations, by a portion of our traveling public, is a sad commen

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ventilated rooms as nests of microbes. "With every passing y

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get heavy foot traffic. In smaller comfort stations they mig

Epilogue: The Decline of Public Privacy

By 1932, in the depths of the Depression, the Woman's City Club of

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the parade of strangers looking to use their restrooms. Buch

"I went in and said to the bartender, 'Give me a drink.'

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Sanitary Suggestions," New York Times , April 20, 1862; George

8. Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in Amer

9. Ogle, Modem Conveniences ; Melosi, Sanitary City, 91-97; Warin

10. Melosi, Sanitary City, 58-67.

11. Report of the Council of Hygiene, 141; "Public Urinals," New

15. "P.U." quotation in "City Matters," Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, J

16. Clara Greed, Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets (Oxford, 2

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18. Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations , 9, 142-58, es

19. Jon M. Kingsdale, "The 'Poor Man's Club': Social Functi

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32. "Citizens' Union Urges Expenditures"; J. J. Cosgrove, "Comfo

34. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, '"The Solitude of Self: Stanton A

35. "Rest Room Now a Fact," Olympia Morning Olympian, Dec. 1, 19

38. McGerr, Fierce Discontent, 81-88; Michael A. Lerner, Dry Ma