Restroom reviews from the collapse of American sanitation
Every room. Every score. The record remains open.
13 dispatches
I came through the door on assignment and stopped cold. There are moments in this line of work when a man realizes he is not reviewing a bathroom so much as documenting a failure of civilization, and this was one of them.
I expected nothing. Forty miles from the nearest stoplight, at a two-pump station whose sign had lost its second vowel years ago, I braced for the worst and found a room so clean it made me question my own assumptions about the human race.
Posted at eye level: a laminated sign reading that this restroom is monitored for your safety and cleaned hourly. Directly beneath it: a wastebasket overflowing onto the tile, an empty paper towel dispenser, and a hand dryer that answered my wave with the silence of a dead man.
The restroom requires a code. The code appears on your receipt. The cheapest item on the menu costs $6.75. I did the arithmetic and concluded that this establishment has found a way to charge admission to a basic human function, then dress it up with reclaimed wood and a chalkboard about community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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