A recent City Council survey of more than 100 public bathrooms in NYC parks has found the facilities sorely lacking. More than two-thirds were either shuttered or missing crucial amenities like soap and toilet paper, council staffers found.
“This report confirms with data what we all know,” said Council Member Shekar Krishnan, who represents Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Woodside, and who chairs the council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation. Staffers from his office and other City Council offices fanned out across the five boroughs earlier this summer to canvass park restrooms in every council district.
The water closet watchdogs used parks department data to identify restrooms with histories of closures and other problems. Then, they visited one men’s room and one women’s room in each district, grading it on availability, cleanliness, accessibility and safety, as well as the presence (or absence) of toilet paper, soap, trash cans and other hygiene items.
Overall, most of the bathrooms had the absolute essentials like functioning toilets and sinks. But about 1 in 10 were missing soap, and 13% didn’t have toilet paper when inspectors visited.
Some of the finer things in life — like locking stalls, trash cans and menstrual product disposal bins — were also in short supply, the inspectors found.
Unsurprisingly, the restrooms ran the gamut from very clean to … very not-clean. Only four received the staffers’ “extremely dirty” designation, though close to a quarter were marked as being unsanitary.
The survey targeted only the most problematic powder rooms, so the results may paint an overly negative picture of the city’s restroom landscape. For example, the report notes, the city’s parks department says that 90% of all park restrooms have baby changing stations – significantly higher than the 24% calculated by the council staffers.
Public parks and playgrounds provide the vast majority of the city’s public restrooms, which are in short supply across the five boroughs. About 11% of bathrooms citywide are out of order, according to parks department data from this past June.
Mayor Eric Adams has promised to fix up three dozen bathrooms across the city and build almost 50 more over the next five years. Many public restrooms have also gotten new baby changing tables in the last year.
You can explore the city’s existing bathrooms, functional and otherwise, using the Mayor’s “Ur In Luck” Google Maps layer.
But Krishnan said it will take a lot more work and money to provide clean, well-stocked and accessible public restrooms for all New Yorkers.
“This is such a basic part of improving the quality of life in our city,” he said. “We are so far from the reality we need to be [in].”