west-end and university neighbourhoods) back in the bushes. Plus, when the city built this brick shithouse, it didn’t winterize it. The bathrooms are closed November 1 through May 1, recalling downtown St. John’s – though there, according to Paul Mackey, most of the bathrooms are winterized; it’s just that there’s little winter demand. In Halifax, it’s a perplexingly opposite situation – great demand and no ability to open the bathrooms. The Halifax Common has become a winter hot spot since the addition of a four-hundred-metre speed-skating oval in 2010. The oval sees more than 120,000 skaters through December, January, February, and March. Within a year of its opening, the city installed a brick plaza, a special events stage, a warming trailer, and a massive piece of public art. As far as bathrooms? The city brought in a row of porta-potties. There are no signs on the Common, or the surrounding area, to light the way for toilet seekers. Unless you know where you’re going, you’re not going at all. Stand in the middle of the Common and punch ‘public washroom’ into Google Maps and all you get is a single hit: a bathroom on the waterfront that’s a twenty-one-minute walk away.
The ramifications here seem clear, not least for tourism. Holidaymakers who don’t have to rush back to their hotels are more likely to stay out and spend money. In most respects, Halifax is pretty savvy when it comes to catering to its 5.3 million annual overnight visitors. And why wouldn’t it be attentive to an industry that, in 2017, pumped $1 billion into the city’s economy? Yet showing the way to the city’s paltry flushable resources isn’t a priority for Halifax’s tourism marketing agency, Destination Halifax, because, apparently, no one ever mentions it to them. When I began researching this book in 2014, I was told they’d never had a single complaint about the dearth of signs (or public toilets). ‘It sounds like one of those things,’ then city spokesperson Shaune MacKinlay told me, ‘that nobody has given a lot of thought to.’ You don’t say?
Perhaps the issue deserves an ear. A string of small communities in the British Columbia interior began focusing on public bathroom installation in 2017 as a way to boost tourism; ditto Denver, Colorado, which introduced two mobile public facilities the same year. If Nova Scotia hopes to hit its goal of $4 billion in annual tourism revenue by 2024, led by its capital city, it will likely be flush in more ways than one.
Speaking of tourism, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, makes a perfect day trip from Halifax. It’s also a good little town to have a pee in. The UNESCO World Heritage Site was founded in 1753 and today is peppered with colourful wood-shingled houses and shops, and prominent kiosk signs listing the town’s main attractions, like the Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic, the rebuilt schooner Bluenose II, and the town’s kick-ass stand-alone public bathroom. ‘We are a community that actively seeks tourist traffic,’ says Mayor Rachel Bailey. ‘A washroom is kind of a necessity.’ And that was the very moment I fell in love with Mayor Bailey.
The Lunenburg public bathroom opened in 2001 and was designed to emulate a Lunenburg cape-style home from the 1700s. It’s the only stand-alone public washroom in town, but Lunenburg is small (2016 population: 2,263) – it’s the kind of place where a real, live human answers when you ring the main municipal line – and the bathroom is easy to get to even from the farthest reaches of the town centre. Mayor Bailey nevertheless suggests Lunenburg could do better, commenting that the north and east ends of town are not as well served as the bathroom-boasting west. Bailey is unswayed when I point out how short that distance is – even a hyperbolist couldn’t estimate the distance across Lunenburg’s downtown as more than a kilometre. ‘I know when you have little ones,’ she says, ‘you don’t always have a lot of time to make it.’ (Preach, Mayor Bailey, preach!) There’s long been talk of adding a second permanent public washroom, and the town’s waterfront development agency is working on plans for bathroom and shower facilities at the other end of the boardwalk. In the meantime, Lunenburg has porta-potties in areas where there are more people and more need, and the town is actively working to make its existing bathrooms accessible to the public, like the one at town hall, which is not accessible, but clean, well-stocked, and very well signed.
The design of the little clapboard Lunenburg public washroom is not the stuff of afterthought. It’s on a main street – Bailey: ‘That’s where the people are’ – and fits puzzle-like into the town’s architecture. Outside the building are a bench, a stone terrace, and, in season, an abundance of columbines and hostas. The interior boasts painted tiles created by one hundred elementary school students who walked the streets of their town choosing flowers, houses, sailboats, and cats to render for the bathroom, each tile its own scene. The bathroom art has been made into a series of cards sold by the Lunenburg Heritage Society. Bea Renton, Lunenburg’s chief administrative officer, tells me she gets emails from tourists in praise of the toilets.
Lunenburgers paid just over $100,000 to build their bathroom and they shell out a little over $14,000 a year to operate and maintain it during its open season, from mid-May through Halloween. It used to close in mid-October, but council voted to extend the dates based on requests from residents and will keep it open later depending on the weather and the need. Opening it all winter is an option, Bailey says, based on demand. The town can also take in revenue from the bathroom by renting space in the front lobby.
I caught wind of the Lunenburg toilet from a friend who stumbled upon it and emailed me a report: ‘Lunenburg has an outstanding public washroom,’ she told me. ‘In a cool building near the waterfront.’ She noted it was spacious and clean and blended into its surroundings. My friends know me well (as does my husband, who snaps pics of ‘Customers Only’ bathroom signs and texts them to me, anticipating my outrage). They’re used to my reporting, both social and professional, and my non-stop touring of the public bathrooms I encounter, whatever city I happen to be in. Like I said, I can’t help myself. The public toilet is a peephole into our public and private selves.
Barbara Penner is a senior lecturer in architectural history at London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and the author of 2014’s Bathroom. In these seemingly mundane spaces, Penner says, ‘you quite quickly understand what society thinks is important.’ Those who are closest to me – and even those who aren’t – invariably laugh at my abiding obsession with public bathrooms. That’s fine with me. And with Penner. ‘People’s initial response is often, “Hee hee hee,’’’ she tells me over Skype from her London office, ‘but followed quite often by very personal confessions.’ After all, we all have a personal relationship with public toilets. They are as inescapable as our desire to leave our homes, as unavoidable as the human need to urinate and defecate. As author Rose George writes in The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, ‘To be uninterested in the public toilet is to be uninterested in life.’ So? What are we waiting for? Let’s go.
2
WAITING FOR A MIRACLE
I have spent my lifetime waiting in toilet lines. Leaning on the wall, staring at the floor, fiddling with my phone, or making idle chitchat with my neighbours in the queue. I grew up being socialized to expect a line for the bathroom. I spent decades so desensitized to the indignity that I never questioned it. Once, as a child, I peed my pants waiting in a bathroom line at a community hall dance. All the while, the boys’ bathroom door hung ajar, the light on, the room unoccupied. I could literally see the toilet. Not a single girl in that line made a move.
I filed that experience away, ashamed. I went home and told my mom. She washed my clothes that night – a dark purple velveteen pantsuit. All I knew was this: waiting was simply what women and girls did while men and boys in the mirror-image door opposite breezed in and breezed out. I internalized the supposed reasons – women were doing their makeup, gabbing, taking too long. For men, the bathroom is an eyes-ahead in-andout; for women, allegedly, it’s some kind of potty party. A pee parade. But here’s the thing: I’ve never seen a woman do more than pat down some stray hairs or slash a strip of lipstick across her mouth in a public bathroom. Without the benefit of knowing what’s going on in the opposite room, men have made judgments about women, while women
