Photo: Frances M. Roberts / Alamy Stock/Alamy Stock Photo
Eric Adams, our rat mayor, now wants to be the bathroom mayor. On Monday, Adams announced an initiative for the city to install 46 new restrooms and renovate 36 existing restrooms over the next five years. There will also be a new Google Maps layer to help people find public bathrooms in the city. Adams is calling the initiative Ur in Luck, a name that he laughed very hard at when he announced it. “What we’re saying is that you should not have to be in luck,” he said. “You should be able to move around the city and deal with some of the basic essentials of being a human being, a parent, and finding the right restroom facilities.”
Will this be an improvement over begging a Starbucks employee for the bathroom code? Forty-six new bathrooms over five years is not much yet typical of the glacial pace at which the city usually builds anything. But the administration promised prefab design and an improved process to bring the new bathrooms online sooner. The Google Maps layer is a little more promising; an upgrade of the Got2Go bathroom map created by Teddy Siegel, it shows the park and library bathrooms, which most people might already have on their mental maps. And it also includes MTA bathrooms and those in privately owned public spaces, or POPS, those lobbies and pocket parks that are not often known for having bathroom options. For delivery workers especially, who are often desperate for a place to go, the map might be both a blessing and a curse, with many neighborhoods showing up as bathroom deserts, like Soho, the Upper East Side, and Chelsea. The stats are still dire; there are currently only 1,000 bathrooms for more than 8 million people. A City Council bill would create or open 3,100 more bathrooms, but when Hell Gate asked the mayor if he supported it, Adams said, “I’m not familiar with the bill, we’ll look at it.”
Still, any new bathroom is welcome. Adams is promising to also fast-track the installation of 14 automatic toilets that have been held up, no exaggeration, since the Bloomberg era. As for the extremely critical information on which public bathrooms are actually clean and functioning, that might still require a bit of crowdsourcing.