Potty’s No. 1 problem: being available
Call it a tempest in a potty. Or don’t. When you’re writing about a $250,000 pay toilet gone wrong, it’s hard to know where to begin and even harder to avoid bad puns.
The prologue: I stopped by the fabulous public toilet near the corner of 18th and East Carson streets on the South Side last week for the reason you’d expect, only to find the gate was locked.
Later, I called the South Side Chamber of Commerce and was told by the guy answering that the toilet had been closed for years.
What?! There’d never been a proper obituary for this toilet that opened in 2003 with as much pageantry as a single-seat facility ever got. There were lines out the wazoo, or at least down Carson.
If anyone could get to the bottom of this, I could. I soon was hearing from potty management that the facility hasn’t been closed for years and should reopen in a matter of days, but first you need the back story.
I first got wind of this toilet in 2001 when its creator came out with a mind-blowing video: automatic doors and self-cleaning floors that roll like a moving sidewalk after each visit. As the floor does its 180-degree flip, the toilet seat does a 360 as a disinfectant is sprayed over it and a squeegee thingie wipes it down.
Watching that video, I craved a prune danish for the first time in years.
The toilet opened a couple of years later, part of the city’s deal with Clear Channel Adshel for the company to erect 350 bus shelters, bike racks and such. The city got all that gratis, also getting a small cut from the ads displayed with them. A Clear Channel Adshel official flew in from New York proclaiming that its laudable loo was one of only 19 in the world, with the others in such nose in-the-air places as New York, Rio de Janeiro and London.
Gene Ricciardi remembers. A district justice who lives and works within a couple of blocks of the site, Mr. Ricciardi back then represented the district as city councilman. He lobbied hard to get the toilet of all toilets because then, as now, public urination was the South Side saloon district curse.
Mr. Ricciardi said he used to keep quarters in a bowl in his kitchen when he threw a party. He’d tell his guests to use the facility down the street, but that joke no longer works because the toilet is so rarely open. City Councilman Bruce Kraus, who now represents the district, also says, “I haven’t seen it operate for a very, very long time.’’
Jim Vlasach, lease manager for Lamar Advertising, said, no, it’s been in operation since 2008, when Lamar took over the Clear Channel Shelter program. It did go down March 31, and a problem with the rotating floor needs assistance from the Swedish manufacturer, but an interim solution should have it operable within days.
“It’s been a real struggle keeping the APT open,’’ Mr. Vlasach wrote, using the acronym favored by Automatic Public Toilet operatives. “Every time we have it open, someone comes along and intentionally vandalizes something in the operating system.’’
It’s all quite a comedown from 2003. Then the city predicted it would be raising more than $2 million a year in ad revenue by now. A spokesman for Mayor Bill Peduto said this week that total revenue reaped from the entire shelter ad deal since its inception amounts to $500,000. All that has gone to the Shade Tree Commission to plant and care for street trees, a connection my dog Teddy would understand immediately.
It’s not as if one reliable toilet would solve the South Side’s problem.
Mr. Kraus said licensing or zoning law needs to be strengthened so bars are required to have adequate restrooms for large crowds. A few years ago, he said, police “saturation patrols’’ (an appropriate term that) handed out 300 citations for South Side public urination in a 90day period.
District Justice Ricciardi knows. He said he handled about a dozen guilty pleas to public urination last week, which meant fines of $300 or $500, plus court costs, depending on ordinance cited.
“Pittsburgh coffers make a mint out of this liquid gold,’’ he said.
Let’s settle for the ad revenue.