Image via Complex Original
Nothing is easy in New York City. Instead of jumping in your car, you wait an hour for a delayed C Train. Instead of taking out a mortgage, working to own your own place, you begin each year wondering whether you'll be priced out of your current neighborhood and the next neighborhood over. Just finding a place to use the bathroom can be a herculean task. Sure, there are a few fabled spotless public restrooms that live on in local folklore, but most stories you hear about public johns are horror stories. What's worse, they're true stories.
Complex journeyed into the seedy underbelly of Manhattan. We inspected public restrooms, as well as the restrooms inside big box retailers and chains that function as de facto public piss-holes in fair Gotham. We've done the research. Now, the findings: the 10 Worst Public Restrooms in NYC.
Written by Brenden Gallagher (@muddycreekU)
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10. Every Starbucks
Neighborhood: Manhattan
Address: Everywhere
Date Visited: 12/2, 12/9, 12/16
Smelled Like: Low-grade Cleaning Solution
Most Heinous Feature: That guy in front of you in line.
Note: Though there are Starbucks locations everywhere, the photos above come from locations near Union Square
Walking into a Starbucks bathroom is like playing the lottery. We applaud the tireless efforts of baristas to keep the facilities in working order while making caramel macchiatos for assholes, and don't envy their lot. For the most part, they do a great job.
That said, every New Yorker has their own horror story about the time they used a 'Bucks bathroom after a particularly depraved individual. When you lose the bathroom lottery, you lose hard. Shit gets graphic, in every possible sense. Combine that with long lines, unrelenting tunes from singer-songwriters blaring from the speakers, and the endless prattle of freelance writers, designers, and students, and the Starbucks bathroom experience can easily be low point of your week.
9. Grand Central Food Court
Neighborhood: Midtown
Address: 89 East 42nd St.
Date Visited: 12/2/2012
Smelled Like: Sweat and Fried Food
Most Heinous Feature: Everything is broken.
The narrow corridors of the basement bathrooms in Grand Central Terminal are reminiscent of cattle chutes. Travellers and work-a-day hustlers move in and out at extreme speeds, pushing through the smells of cheap Chinese and Mexican food, in a desperate attempt to escape the bowels of this transit hub. "Out of order" is the order of the day here. On any given day, you'll find that different hand-dryers, sinks, and (God forbid) toilets are newly out of comission. When even one of these machines is down, it gums up the fast-paced works, causing congestion, leaving scores of travellers anxiously waiting for their moment of sweet relief.
8. Wendy's Basement (Across From the Empire State Building)
Neighborhood: Koreatown
Address: 335 5th Ave.
Date Visited: 12/16/2012
Smelled Like: Grease
Most Heinous Feature: The huge pole that takes up half the space.
We feel bad singling out the pigtailed creator of the Baconator, as every fast-food bathroom in Midtown is a hellhole. But we have to; there must be an offering, and that offering must be Wendy.
The tiny size of the bathroom, the resaurant's location—directly across the street from the Empire State Building—and the huge black pole jutting up through the floor next to the toilet, make this spot stand out from the pack. On a busy day you'll wait in a line that snakes around the subterranean tables packed with exhausted families of tourists dunking nuggets, standing behind folks in their new "I <3 NY" shirts and foam Statue of Liberty head pieces, slupring Frosties to distract themselves from the wait. As the German man in line muttered, "Das ist nicht so gut."
7. Central Park, at Sheep Meadow
Neighborhood: Lincoln Square
Address: Central Park, West Side From 66th to 69th St.
Date Visited: 12/9/2012
Smelled Like: Garbage
Most Heinous Feature: The pile of filled garbage bags sitting on a shelf in the corner.
We explored the numerous bathrooms dotting Central Park as cruel winter approached. Some of the most offensive lavatories, like the Bethesda Fountain bathrooms, are locked up for the season as a gesture of mercy. The stench that rises from the depths of those spots is contained, if only for a few glorious months, by the cold.
Though the rest of the bathroom at Sheep Meadow is standard Central Park grime, there's a pile of garbage bags perched on shelves next to the toilet that make this spot uniquely unbearable. Why install shelving of this sort in the bathroom? Of the 843 acres in the park, it's strange that they couldn't find room for one more maintenance shed or dumpster. While we can appreciate the cost-saving measure in the abstract, we did not appreciate it during our visit.
6. Macy's Herald Square, Basement
Neighborhood: Garment District
Address: 151 West 34th St.
Date Visited: 12/9/2012
Smelled Like: Sadness
Most Heinous Feature: The longest bathroom line in human history.
While we picked a relatively good time, all things considered, to use the Central Park bathrooms, we descended into Macy's at the worst possible time. Truly, we're not ready to talk about what we witnessed. If you're ever assigned a paper for lit class about "Man's Inhumanity to Man," begin your research here, because this is on some Lord of the Flies shit. Customers balancing Cuisinarts and bags of clothing jostled each other for position in line for these tiny-ass bathrooms. Fathers and brothers moped sadly on the nearby steps, glumly waiting for female family members to emerge from the never-ending women's room line. Sure, the facilities are pretty okay by cleanliness standards, but that's like saying the waiting room for hell has comfy chairs.
5. Port Authority Basement, at the Bus Terminal
Neighborhood: Garment District
Address: 625 8th Ave.
Date Visited: 12/2/2012, 12/16/2012
Smelled Like: Exhaust
Most Heinous Feature: The threat of being hit by a bus.
The worst thing about the bathrooms at the Port Authority is the proximity to the bus terminals. There's less than a yard between the door to the men's room and the doors to the buses. On a busy day, the two lines intertwine like snakes, the smell of exhaust mingling with the stench of sweat from tired travellers waiting for a bus that should've arrived six hours ago. Just like Grand Central's bathrooms, the restrooms of the Port Authority are maintained as best they can be, but even a round-the-clock staff can't keep up with the demand.
On the day we visited, every urinal was covered in a clear tarp. Only the stalls could provide relief. Things will only become worse as holiday travel picks up.
4. Penn Station Amtrak Terminal next to Auntie Anne's Pretzels
Neighborhood: Chelsea
Address: 1 Penn Plaza
Date Visited: 12/2/2012
Smelled Like: B.O.
Most Heinous Feature: The number of people there that aren't trying to use the bathroom.
If you're nostalgic for the old New York, and by "the old New York," we mean vagrants and hustlers bickering in public, this is the restroom for you. This restroom seems to be the official meeting place for Gotham's seediest characters (perhaps this is a Meetup group we're unaware of?). In the short time we spent in the bathroom, we heard enough conversations about potential business opportunities, challenges to fights, and general shit-talking to fill the grittiest slice-of-life indie drama.
The bathrooms were appropriately foul, but most of the people in the bathroom weren't using the facilities. Those using the stalls weren't even using them for their proper functions. The stalls here work like miniature motel rooms/phone booths/changing rooms. Our photographer waited twenty minutes just to get a picture of the stall above.
3. Times Square Subway Station
Neighborhood: Times Square
Address: 42nd St., between Broadway and 8th Ave.
Date Visited: 12/2/2012
Smelled Like: That Subway Smell
Most Heinous Feature: The prison-like entry system.
The subway bathrooms of New York City are elusive. There are varied, conflicting reports about them; the very existance of some remains up for debate. The most ridiculous of these mythological lavatories is the one located in the middle of the Times Square subway station. These slim booths sit behind glass, militantly attended by an MTA employee who waits in the wings with his own key ring. He must buzz you into the bathrooms, and if the buzzer doesn't work, he'll have to let you in on his own.
Perhaps we should consider ourselves lucky, though. We can only imagine what these bathrooms were like before these odd precautions were added. What happened here to require high-security bathrooms? What stories would these dank-ass walls tells if they could talk?
2. Tompkins Square Park
Neighborhood: East Village
Address: 500 East 9th St.
Date Visited: 12/9/2012
Smelled Like: Booze
Most Heinous Feature: The refuse in the urinals.
The East Village remains a colorful, vibrant neighborhood, and nowhere is this more evident than in Tompkins Square Park. We were greeted by guys hanging out, swapping cigarettes in front of their live-in shopping carts, as the sun set on a blustery December day. Inside, a man screeched in tongues, while another used the urinals pictured above. Yes, he used the one with the traffic cone. Yes, the other two were open and available. Life, right? While some municipal bathrooms are still well-maintained, others seem to have been given back to the forces of nature. This is one of those places.
1. Grand Street Soccer Field
Neighborhood: Lower East Side
Address: Grand St., between Chrystie and Forsyth St.
Date Visited: 12/9/2012
Smelled Like: Human Waste
Most Heinous Feature: The regulars.
And here's another one. This is less a restroom than it is an itinerant community. In the half-hour we spent there, we saw folks bathing in the sink, downing 40s on the john, getting dressed for work, discussing the day's events, and then a number of things that we couldn't understand. The women's restroom has been commandeered by actual bathroom users, particularly young children with soccer scrimmages. But it looks like the NYC Parks Department has given up on the idea that the men's room will ever again be a functioning bathroom, as it hasn't been attended to since, probably, the Carter administration. Who needs it as a bathroom, anyway? It's such a versatile space. Imagine the potential if you wiped the urine off all the surfaces? The mind reels.