THE ‘CAMILLIENNES’
Public toilets were once relatively commonplace, and treated as a basic public service for thousands of years.
Romans used them as far back as the second century B.C., with rows of holes cut into a bench where people would sit side by side. Even then, they weren’t very clean, archeologists have found.
In medieval London, many public toilets were situated over rivers, and there was even an 84-seater called Whittington’s Longhouse, named “after Dick Whittington, Mayor of London, who apparently frequented this establishment in 1480,” notes Clara Greed in Inclusive Urban Design: Public Toilets.
The Industrial Revolution, with its mass migration of people into urban settings to work in the factories, necessitated the creation of better sewage systems to ward off disease.
In Montreal, public toilets were scant until then-mayor Camillien Houde decided they should be built as a make-work Depression-era project in the 1930s.
Octagonal and ornate, with stone walls, large windows, elegant ironwork and copper roofs, the buildings masked their function and were so attractive that some models have been converted — like the one in Dorchester Square downtown that is now a café-bar serving sandwiches and ice cream.
They were also criticized when they were first built for being too expensive.
The “camilliennes,” as they came to be known — a play on the French term, vespasiennes — lasted until the mid-1970s, when then-mayor Jean Drapeau decided they had to be shut because they were too costly to clean and maintain.
Critics have surmised the closures may also have been due to Drapeau’s more puritanical sensibilities, amid fears the toilets were being used for illicit gambling and sex, in the same way he had thousands of trees razed on Mount Royal in 1954 because Montrealers were thought to be using the coverage of greenery to engage in hanky-panky.