Last week, Mayor Eric Adams trumpeted the installation of five modular, stainless steel public bathrooms featuring a single toilet in select neighborhoods in New York City.
"Let's be honest, when nature calls, New Yorkers shouldn't have to cut their fun short. Today, we are relieving one of the biggest obstacles to enjoying our parks and public spaces," he said, noting that the new bathrooms are cheaper and quicker to build than traditional restrooms.
The five Portland Loos can be found in Joyce Kilmer Park in the Bronx, Irving Square Park in Brooklyn, Thomas Jefferson Park in Manhattan, Hoyt Playground in Queens, and Father Macris Park in Staten Island.
The bathrooms come thanks to a $6 million pilot program that is part of the mayor's "Ur In Luck" campaign to build 46 new public bathrooms and renovate 36 more through 2029.
Upon first glance, the Portland Loo appears like a good solution to our city's dire lack of public bathrooms—they come prefabricated, which shaves about a year off the current timeline for building a new public bathroom in the city, and purchasing and installing one of the loos costs "only $1 million per location," per Adams's press release, much less than building a traditional bathroom. (Don't get the Portland Loos confused with the other prefabricated toilets the City has purchased in the past—most of those toilets, obtained by the Bloomberg administration, are still languishing nearly two decades later at a mysterious and undisclosed location.)
Are these Portland Loos the future of public bathrooms in our fine metropolis? I headed to Irving Square Park in Bushwick on a recent Wednesday morning to test out the bathroom that the city is heralding as a "smart, speedy solution" to a lack of toilets in public spaces.
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