Historicist: "The city that nobody loves"
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
Sometimes you have to spell out what would seem to be self-evident. This sign on the door of a store on Spadina Avenue just north of Oxford Street once again raises the question of whether the automated public washrooms Toronto is reportedly getting beginning next year, as part of Astral Media’s advertising-driven "street furniture" plan, will be anywhere near enough. The follow-up question has to be: even if there was a pay-toilet right on the corner, would the pisser and/or puker bother fumbling for a loonie to gain access or save the money and go ahead and defile the doorway, anyway?
We've noticed in Paris—where there are not only a good many automated loos, but they're also free—that some pragmatic Parisians still pee when and wherever the urge takes them, be it behind a hedge in a park or between cars in a parking lot. Whatever the country, throwing up, alas, tends to be an even more urgent proposition. So perhaps the NIMDY (Not In My DoorwaY?) approach is as good as any to, if not curb unacceptable behaviour, at least send it down the street.
Photo by Bill Taylor/Torontoist
| CORRECTION: NOVEMBER 24, 2008
This article originally mistakenly said that Toronto is "reportedly getting" "twenty automated public washrooms" in 2009. Though the Canadian Press article we cited did report as much in July, the actual roll-out of washrooms is much slower than that: twenty are supposed to be installed from 2009 to 2019 at a pace of no more than two a year. By the end of 2009, Toronto is slated to have one and only one automated washroom installed. |
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I bet that when they install the new public potties people will piss ON them, not in them.
This random bodily purgings from random drunks will still happen. Should someone who has had too much to drink at a club actualy manage to find a dollar for the pay washroom, might only have them ask the question "Where the hell is my coffee"?
I live at a TTC-Urine nexus. The Bloor blue line stops right at my door so drunks piss there while waiting for the bus, and Ossington station is across the street so I regularly round the corner to the alley and find someone pissing before running (back) to the subway.
But graffiti is the big issue with people here? Not the absolutely gross acts of pissing in public, the splatter of puke on sidewalks in the Annex and Koreatown, the 50 blackened gum wads per sidewalk paving, or the millions of cigarette buts we'll get to discover when the snow and ice melts in the spring?
the city should just ask this guy to hang out at various locations throughout the city:
http://toronto.en.craigslist.ca/bra/cas/930051570.html
Those bathroom are (IMHO) one of the stupidest ideas of Astral's yet. And Astral has a lot of stupid ideas.
I'll put graffiti on par with piss and puke but only because it's harder to remove. Thankfully Torontoist doesn't celebrate those acts.
Yet.
Urineist?
Expectorist?
Vomitust?
Vomitist?
Yeah, graffiti is so hard to remove and most likely done in sobriety, so it's a grave issue.
It amuses me that people compare our new solution to public urination with Paris. I haven't spent much time in Paris, but what does stand out from my brief stay was that the smell of urine was everywhere. In my limited experience, every metro station stank like the scotiabank machine at Parliament and Gerrard (a urine soak vestibule if ever there was one).
Your brief stay must have been quite some time ago, sloan. That's not the Paris I've known for the past 30 years.
Graffiti is hygiene-neutral, doesn't smell, isn't nearly as pervasive as gum stains or cigarette butts, and actually makes the city look better.
Some graf makes the city look better. Stupid tags don't qualify.
I just appended a correction above: Toronto will have not twenty, but one automated washroom installed by the end of 2009.
Lock up your doorways!
Two a year? How is it possible to do anything that slowly?
I was in France around early 2000, and watched an older lady let her dog take a crap right in the middle of the sidewalk. She didn't think anything of it.
I used one of these babies in London in May. Despite its description of being "self-cleaning," it still wasn't that clean.
It was, however, a relief that it was there at all.
The lack of decent public toilets is related to the decline of the public commons. There should be public washrooms all over the fricken place.