The Sanctuary List
Van Horn, Texas · The Last Chance Fuel Stop
Forty miles from the nearest stoplight, a cleaning log on the back of the door with initials every two hours since 6 a.m. The most radical document the Correspondent has read all year.
5 plungers · the cleaning log
Sign Watch
Toledo, Ohio · PillBarn Pharmacy
A laminated promise of hourly cleaning hangs above an overflowing wastebasket and a dead hand dryer. A company that sells medicine should know a placebo when it prints one.
2 plungers · the sign, for lying
Zero Plunger
Portland, Oregon · Ritual & Reclaim Coffee Co.
The code is on your receipt, and the cheapest receipt costs $6.75. The Correspondent did not buy the coffee, did not see the restroom, and therefore cannot review it, which is precisely the point.
0 plungers · a door with a price tag
The Sanctuary List · Hall of Fame
New Braunfels, Texas · Buc-ee’s
Eighty-three toilets, every one flushed, every floor dry, staff moving through the room with the grim purpose of a Secret Service detail. Cintas named it America’s Best Restroom in 2012. The Correspondent considers that an understatement bordering on slander.
5 plungers · the entire building
Full Review
Rock Springs, Wyoming · Interstate 80 Rest Area
The door weighs as much as a Buick and opens onto a cinderblock room that the state of Wyoming clearly designed for weather rather than people. I came in off a stretch of interstate where the semis lean into the crosswind like drunks against a bar, and I assumed the building would offer shelter. It does not.
Full Review
Toledo, Ohio · Glass City Park / Toledo Rust Belters
Twelve thousand people spent six innings drinking domestic beer at $11 a cup, and then, during the seventh-inning stretch, every man in the ballpark remembered he had a body. The restroom they all arrived at was built in 1987 to serve roughly four hundred.
Full Review
Chicago, Illinois · The Gilded Rib Steakhouse
The steaks here cost $78, and the restroom has been designed to remind you of that. The marble is real. The faucets are gold, or something that wants you to believe it is gold. The light is low and amber, the kind usually found in a jewelry case or a funeral parlor.
Full Review
Shreveport, Louisiana · Parish Courthouse, Third Floor
Every weekday in this building, people stand before a judge to answer for their failures: unpaid fines, overgrown lots, rental properties allowed to rot. One floor down from the courtroom where those sentences are handed out, the parish has stopped maintaining its own property entirely.
Full Review
Denver, Colorado · Rocky Peaks International Airport
Every fixture in this room is motion activated, and each one has developed its own private theory of what motion is. The airport spent a great deal of public money to make sure no traveler would ever have to touch anything. It succeeded. Nothing here can be touched, and very little of it works.
Full Review
Phoenix, Arizona · Bolt & Board Hardware Supply
The customer restroom sits behind aisle 31, past the lumber and the bags of concrete mix, in a corner the store would prefer you forget. A hand-lettered sign points the way. The arrow on it points in the wrong direction.
Full Review
San Francisco, California · Quiescent Labs
There are no men's or women's rooms here. There are "Restoration Pods," four of them, each a sealed white capsule with a frosted touchscreen door, like something a billionaire would launch into orbit. A soft chime greets you on entry. Recorded birdsong plays from hidden speakers. The lighting shifts from blue to a gentle peach, which a placard informs me is "calibrated to reduce cortisol."
Sanctuary List
Atlantic City, New Jersey · Lucky Clover Diner
At three in the morning, after the casinos have taken everything a man brought with him and some things he did not, the Lucky Clover is still open. The coffee is still hot. The pie case still turns. And the restroom in back is kept so clean that it borders on an act of defiance.
