1 in 10 NYC public restrooms are out of order

As if it wasn’t hard enough already to find a bathroom in New York City.

Around 11% of New York City’s public restrooms are out of commission, according to a Gothamist analysis of the most recent data posted to the city’s OpenData portal by the parks department. The off-limits lavatories exacerbate pre-existing “bathroom deserts” in a city with precious few places to go.

Of the city’s 1,047 public restrooms, 116 were either closed or out of order, according to the data, last updated earlier this summer. About three-quarters of the padlocked powder rooms were in public parks and playgrounds; the rest were mostly in public libraries that were closed for construction. Parks and libraries account for 98% of the city’s public bathroom landscape; the rest are scattered across a handful of subway stations and so-called “privately owned public spaces.”

In some neighborhoods, the closed facilities — if they were open — would have been the only publicly available options within walking distance. East Harlem, for example, has six public restrooms, but four were out of order as of the most recent data. The two remaining functioning public restrooms are more than a mile-and-a-half apart. Without functioning public restrooms close at hand, unlucky New Yorkers have to try their luck at restaurants and storefronts.

“If you look at the map, you can clearly see that it's disproportionately spread out where the bathrooms are, and especially where the bathrooms are currently closed,” said Teddy Siegel, the creator of Got2GoNYC, a crowdsourced list of public and private NYC restrooms. “It doesn't matter what ZIP code you're in – you should be able to be within walking distance of a public restroom at all times.”

Gabriela Perez operates a food cart on 116th Street in East Harlem. She’s just a block away from two of the neighborhood’s public restrooms – but both of them are closed. One of those, at the Aguilar branch of the New York Public Library, is closed for renovation as part of wider overhaul of libraries in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens that has temporarily shuttered several locations. And the toilets in nearby Poor Richard’s Playground are locked tight, with an “OUT OF ORDER” sign posted on the door of the men’s room.

Perez said she uses the bathroom at the bodega on the corner.

“There are no public bathrooms around,” she said in Spanish. “I need to ask for permission to go in the stores.”

Public parks and playgrounds are home to more than 800 of the city’s public restrooms, and 86 of those were out of order in June.

Shuttered restrooms in playgrounds can be especially challenging for families with children, especially when officers are willing to enforce laws prohibiting public urination. In April, they ticketed a woman whose son peed near a patch of weeds in the Battery Playscape. She told ABC that she believed the park's restroom was closed when she saw a sign on a Parks Department building that read "No Bathroom." Parks' spokesperson Chris Clark told Gothamist that the mother was at the wrong building and that nearby public restroom was open.

"Since then we’ve added even more signs to clear up any confusion," Clark said by email.

Many parks department bathrooms have received new baby changing tables in the last year, Gothamist reported in April. And earlier this summer, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would build nearly 50 new public bathrooms and renovate an additional 36 across the five boroughs. The city also debuted a Google Map showing public toilets across the city. The map and the underlying data that Gothamist analyzed are current as of early June and will be updated biannually.

At the announcement for the initiative, dubbed “Ur In Luck,” Adams acknowledged the special difficulty of navigating a bathroomless city with small children.

“If you’re a New Yorker, we all know it, finding available restrooms is a real challenge and particularly if you have children, it brings about an additional challenge,” he said in June. “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.”

Siegel, the Got2GoNYC creator, praised the initiative in a phone interview with Gothamist, but said it’s still not enough.

“A lot of these public restrooms are either not well maintained or they close extremely early,” she said. “And it's not really acceptable to have park bathrooms closing in the middle of the afternoon.”

This story has been updated to include the Parks Department's response to questions about the woman who was ticketed at the Battery Playscape. A spokesperson also provided more details about the incident.