The first of what eventually will be 20 public restrooms – roughly one for every year New Yorkers have been waiting for them – opened Thursday in Madison Square Park.
(What, not Flushing?)
The public restrooms are part of a $1 billion “street furniture” contract – including bus shelters and newsstands – the city negotiated in 2005 with the Spanish company Cemusa.
The single-occupancy, self-cleaning kiosks (fee: 25 cents) automatically unlock after 15 minutes, and are eventually to be located in all five boroughs.
Call it little steps for little feet.
And those feet took a long time to get to this point.
In the mid 1980s, a civil-rights advocate first sued the MTA to re-open long-padlocked public restrooms in the subways. But the MTA won, citing a past ruling that the authority had no obligation to keep up its facilities. So no (legal) platform relief.
In the early ’90s, one plan was scuttled amid concerns by civic groups that advertiser-supported toilet kiosks would be eyesores – and complaints by disabilities activists that the toilets wouldn’t comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
A few years later, the first “street furniture” mega-contract the city negotiated was supposed to yield 30 public toilets. But that plan went down the drain as the decade drew to a close – the victim of unexplained red tape between City Hall and the City Council.
While Mayor Bloomberg hasn’t exactly made tax relief a priority, he can fairly be said to have focused on other forms of relief: A public-restroom proposal has been on the table since his second year in office.
And now, finally, one has opened.
Of course, it will now be a race to see what will happen first: The other 19 come on line – or some activist files suit on behalf of vagrants who decide that WC really stands for walk-in closet.