User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Illinois

Public toilets in Illinois are found at a rate of around five per 100,000 people. The lack of toilets caused health problems in Chicago in the 1800s, which led to infrastructure improvements to address this, which continued into the 1920s. Soon after, women started abandoning public toilets. Public pay toilets were installed but later removed because they were viewed as sexist. Public toilets have been used to reinforce class privilege. More were closed as a result of 9/11.

Public toilets
A 2021 study found there were five public toilets per 100,000 people. Chicago had 165 public toilets in 2021.

Public toilets are often located in semi-private public accommodations like hotels, stores, restaurants and coffee shops instead of being street level municipal maintained facilities.

History
A Chicago Tribune article in the 1850s said that human waste was so bad that the streets "are ankle deep in festering corruption and rottenness." 6% of the deaths in Chicago in 1854 were from cholera. The need to build infrastructure for both public and private toilets in Chicago in the late 1800s required that the city raise the level of the streets.

Railway stations began building big terminals in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. One of their features were big public toilet facilities. Train station designer Walter G. Berg said in his 1893 that public toilet facilities should be used to keep undesirable elements out.

Chicago was one of the biggest cities by population in the United States in 1900 and lot of tenement housing in the early 1900s lacks toilet provisions. The Progressive Era saw reformists make a major push to address public hygiene. As part of this push, they sought to improve the toilet and sanitation in tenement housing in cities across the United States. In the 1900s, a Progressive Era campaign  by municipalities, academics and socialists resulted in efforts in Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, Cleveland and Madison to replace saloons with comfort stations.

In the 1900s and 1910s, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Toledo, Worcester, Salt Lake City, Providence, Binghamton, Hartford, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Portland and the District of Columbia all built underground public toilets, most located in the city center in the local business district. The prestige of building underground public comfort stations was so high that some towns and cities who were unable to afford underground public toilets opted for none instead.

During parts of the 1920s, the City of Chicago refused to build more public toilets because of the cost. They said any public toilets that were built needed to be able to pay for themselves through user fees. This rarely was possible so no public toilets were built.

As the Prohibition effort began to take more shape in the 1910s, large cities in the Northeast and Midwest had women's groups advocating for the creation of large numbers of comfort stations as a way of discouraging men from entering drinking establishments in search of public toilets. This was successful in many places in getting cities to build comfort stations, but the volume of new public toilets built was rarely enough to meet public needs. As part of the the Prohibition Party’s platform in the 1915 Chicago municipal election, the party said they would work towards more drinking fountains and comfort stations in the city. Voters in Chicago assessed a $150,000 bond issue in 1917 to build a city wide network of public toilets. The effort made the ballot as a result of the efforts of Jennie Franklin Purvin and the Woman’s City Club of Chicago.

Woman’s City Club of Chicago President Louise DeKoven Bowen said after prohibition became national law in January 1919 that it would result in the closure of 7,000 public toilets, which the city needed but was failing to address as the city only had five public toilets in the Loop. People in Chicago instead started turning to hotels and department stores in the city, who began installing coin operated toilets inside or eliminating their public toilets as a result. Despite the Chicago Woman’s City Club getting the city to build public toilet facilities, many of the club's more affluent members did not use them. Other members of the club tried to actively encourage these members to use them so that they could continue to monitor their quality. By 1922 though, most of the club's activities around public toilets had ceased and no other organization took up the mantel.

Because of changes in attitudes and the country going in a more conservative direction, starting in the 1920s, public health officials began to advocate less for public toilets and improved sanitation as this was seen as primarily helping the less affluent. At the same time, these same public health officials were also often advocating for less privacy in public toilets, seeing it as counterproductive in their battle try to fight and track sexually transmitted diseases, especially among poor people and people of color. While maintaining privacy in public toilets had been a goal prior to that, it ceased to be by then.

By the 1940s, many municipal governments in the United States found themselves in charge of running and maintaining local public transportation networks and the public toilet network that came with them. These toilets had historically had maintenance issues, problems with vandalism and other issues. To try to keep their budgets in check, many cities closed public toilets associated with their public transit networks. They were assisted in doing this by affluent people being less willing to pay to use these facilities, especially as they increasingly had toilets in their homes.

Chicago was one of the largest cities in the United States in 1950. Most city operated public toilets in the 1950s and 1960s were pay toilets. The fee to access these toilets was around a nickel or a dime, with the money earned being invested back into toilet maintenance and upkeep. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, public pay toilets were viewed by feminist activists as sexist because public urinals were free but public sit style toilets were not. The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America, more commonly known as CEPTIA, tried to change this by getting municipals on public pay toilets. Their first success was in Chicago in 1973. This was then followed by municipal and state wide success in a strong of additional states including Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Wyoming. By 1980, coin-operated toilets had almost disappeared from the public landscape.

Most public toilets in public transit stations closed during the 1960s and 1970s as a means of trying to reinforce class privilege.

Many public toilets were closed in the early 2000s as part of security measures following the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Sex segregated public toilets
Because women were less likely than men to use public toilets in the 1910s and 1920s, many towns and cities made women's comfort stations smaller than men's toilets. Women's toilets also often had shorter hours because women at that time felt less comfortable being out on the streets at night. Because Prohibition saw an increase in the construction of public toilets to address the new found demand, many municipalities located outside the South built sex-segregated public toilets that were essentially the same construction inside, with the same number of stalls and layout for each.

Women's toilets
Women's groups were the biggest advocates for the introduction of female only public toilets in Chicago in the mid and late 1800s. Department stores, catering to a large female client base, started building women's public toilets for their customers by the late 1800s. While Chicago had no comfort station for women downtown in 1902, Marshall Fields opened a branch with 39 attended restrooms that year.

As the 1920s waned and fears around lack of public toilets began to lessen as Prohibition became more the norm, the demand from citizens for more public toilets reduced as people grew used to making do and using private community toilets at places like hotels, restaurants, theaters and department stores instead. Women had also been very interested in this topic as part of their activism inside the Suffrage movement. As that goal was achieved, these groups often also lost interest in issues around public toilet access.

Starting in the 1920s, middle and upper-class women living in cities stopped using public toilets, and instead shifted to toilets in facilities like hotels, theaters, train stations and department stores. While these toilets were free to use, the cultural expectation was that they would be exclusively used by clients or people who had purchased tickets. This helped ensure that these facilities were not accessible to working class women. At the same time, women were often uncomfortable at public toilets in the 1930s, because they were easily outnumbers by men and the facilities were often egalitarian.

Illinois, Oklahoma, Florida and North Carolina did not ratify the 1973 Equal Rights Amendment. It is possible the opposition framing the constitutional amendment as requiring all public toilets become unisex played some role in the lack of ratification.

Men's toilets
A men's public toilet at a Chicago train station in 1908 averaged over 7,000 users a day.

Chicago teamsters often had difficulty finding public toilets in the 1910s, and as a result went to saloons where alcohol was served to use them. As saloons were not free like public toilets, this culturally obligated the men to pay for a drink. This sort of action played a two-fold role in Chicago and American society at the time. First, it helped to drive a desire to build more public toilets. Second, it helped fuel the prohibition movement.

Members of the Woman’s City Club of Chicago monitored a public toilet at Washington Square to discourage loitering and homosexual activity. While the city of Chicago still lacked a large number of public toilets in the late 1910s, the public toilet at Washington and LaSalle had had  137,269 mostly male visitors by 1918.