New York City unveils plan to solve its public bathroom emergency

Facing a public bathroom emergency, Mayor Eric Adams on Monday announced plans to build or renovate 82 restrooms over the next five years.

The new facilities aim to make it easier for New Yorkers to hit the head when they’re out and about, without having to resort to soiling the streets and sidewalks.

“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,” Adams said at a press conference in front of restrooms at Frederick Johnson playground in Harlem. “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.”

City officials said 46 of the toilets will be newly built, while the other 36 are existing public bathrooms that will be renovated. They’ll be scattered throughout each of the five boroughs, Adams said, touting the plan dubbed “Ur In Luck.”

The construction schedule equates to about nine new public bathrooms a year. It comes two years after the City Council passed legislation to identify which ZIP codes most badly need a public facility.

The city on Monday also released a digital map of roughly 1,000 public toilets across the five boroughs, including those in parks and libraries. The bulk of the locations have limited hours of operation and are not open overnight.

Adams was joined by popular “bathroom influencer” Teddy Siegel, who in 2021 created the Instagram account “Got to Go NYC” to help people find places to relieve themselves.

“Over the past three years, I’ve learned from my community that New York City’s lack of publicly accessible restrooms is not only a quality of life and public health issue, but it’s an equity crisis,” she said.

The city’s existing bathrooms are in rough shape. The mayor said locals “need good etiquette” when using public toilets, arguing if “you want to come into a clean bathroom, leave a clean bathroom.”

The announcement by the mayor comes as his administration is proposing $55 million in cuts to the Parks Department’s annual budget. Advocates say that would result in less maintenance in the city’s parks, including bathrooms.

Parks commissioner Sue Donoghue said the department has a “dedicated park staff” that cleans bathrooms daily.

“It is a core part of our mission, absolutely, to have clean bathrooms,” Donoghue said.

The gold standard of pristine potties in New York can be found at Bryant Park, which has a public bathroom that’s been lauded as the cleanest in the five boroughs. The toilets are open from 8 a.m. to 10:45 p.m. every day, and representatives from the Bryant Park Corporation said they staff the facilities with private cleaners and attendants.

The news of the loos also comes after the parks department last month announced the installation of 600 new baby changing tables at public restrooms across the city. The upgrade came three years before a 2027 deadline set by the City Council last year requiring every public park bathroom to include the changing station.