User:JustinePorto/Public toilets in Ohio

Public toilets in Ohio are relatively common at seven per 100,000 people. They have been used as public health tools and tools of social oppression. Public toilets started to reappear in the 2000s.

Public toilets
A 2021 study found there were seven public toilets per 100,000 people. 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.

Cintas awards America’s Best Public Restroom. The ten 2020 finalists included the public toilets at Gaslight Bar & Grill in Cincinnati.

History
Cincinnati built public urinals, only able to be used by men, in the 1860s at a cost of USD$45 each.

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.

Cleveland and Cincinnati were some of the biggest cities by population in the United States in 1900. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Women in Cleveland, faced with the issue of sometimes dirty public toilets but still wanting to support free public toilets, suggested the city operate two tiers of public toilets; some that were free and had less maintenance some some that were pay and that were cleaner. One of the issues with this solution was that it entrenched a lack of inequality among residents based on class lines.

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.

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.

Cleveland and Cincinnati were some 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. The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America (CEPTIA) created a campaign in 1970 that led to a ban on pay toilets in many places in the country. 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.

Starting in the early 2000s, Portland, Oregon began a push to put user-friendly stand-alone public toilets on street corners. They were designed to be vandalism proof. Their designed proved popular, and the toilets were later installed in other cities including Denver, Cincinnati, San Antonio and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Arkansas, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wyoming sued the Obama administration in July 2016 over the administration's requirement that children be allowed to use school toilets based on their gender identity instead of their sex.

The AARP has given grants of over USD$70,000 to cities and towns including Biddeford in Maine, Delaware County in Ohio, Boulder County in Colorado and Fairfax in California to make their public toilets more accommodating to older members of their community by making them compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.