Pooh-Poohing the Pissoirs

Pooh-Poohing the Pissoirs

Last Wednesday, the city revealed the sleek, Modernist, stainless-steel design of the latest attempt to give us pissoirs. They're automated, self-cleaning and graffiti-resistant. There was much hoopla at the unveiling. We've seen it all before. Every few years, there's a big announcement and another sleek, efficient design for the New Public Toilets is unveiled. Then nothing else happens. No public toilets appear, and no one notices. The city has been working toward a public toilet since the Koch administration.

Tourists may dig them, but New Yorkers know instinctively that it's just a bad idea. If they ever get installed, we give them a week before the first public-toilet rape, murder, or overdose. And as for the claim that the toilets will be shut down at night to "prevent the homeless from taking up residence"-it's cute that they really think that'll work.

Yes, "civilized" major cities like Paris have public toilets. But at heart, regardless of what recent administrations might like us to believe, we simply aren't civilized, and we will make it our sworn duty to render these things unusable. (Besides, if you live here long enough, you know where to go if you're having "an emergency.")

Face it, these things aren't for pissing in anyway. Cemusa, Inc.-who cut a deal with the city to provide matching sets of stainless steel newsstands, bus stops and pay toilets-all but admits it. The structures may sound functional, but in reality they're just fancy billboards. See, it won't matter if the toilet doesn't work, so long as the exterior walls can still hold ads. The new toilets, newsstands and bus stops are just contrived excuses to dump more available advertising space across a city that was apparently running out of places to slap posters plugging hair cream, power bars and SUVs.

Looking at it that way, I guess you could say that the toilets will still be able to hold a lot of crap.