In the long, bitter history of the absent public toilets of New York, the cluster in Times Square must be counted as a mirage: They will be dismantled at the end of the year, promotional duty done. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Earlier this year, the city announced that by June, it would finally, definitely, really open the first of a new generation of public toilets in Madison Square Park, and that the next one would be set up in the Bronx. A gleaming model was displayed.
Update: No public toilets yet.
“By the end of the year, we are confident we will have the first public toilets in operation,” a Transportation Department spokesman said yesterday.
There is no sense remapping the entire trail of broken promises. A single episode will do.
In the mid-1980s, Oliver Leeds, a veteran civil rights advocate who was beginning to find prolonged subway rides intolerable, sued the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to reopen the bathrooms in the subway stations, which had long been padlocked on the grounds that no public toilet rackwere better than unspeakable ones.
In moving to dismiss the Leeds suit, the authority’s lawyers cited a precedent showing that the city had no duty to keep up its facilities: Someone had already gone to court to establish better standards of habitation for animals in public zoos, and a judge absolved the city of any such obligation. The same logic prevailed in Mr. Leeds’s case.
The Bloomberg administration has seen deliverance from the grips of this unforgiving past, and its name is advertising. The city granted a Spanish advertising company a 20-year contract last year to build and maintain “street furniture,” like bus stop shelters, newsstands and public toilets. The company will be allowed to sell advertising space on the furniture, and in exchange will pay the city $1.4 billion.
