In Washington: A Guide to Discomfort Stations

By RICHARD CONNIFF

Saturday morning and you're out at the discount store with the family. Suddenly the three-year-old starts hip-hopping urgently from foot to foot, and you know what that means. In the men's room there is no toilet paper. When Daddy asks for some, the woman at the customer-service desk eyes him as if he were just the sort of geek to jam the roll down the toilet, flush twice and drown everybody in the store. The toilet, it turns out, does not flush well anyway. Also there's no soap, and the sink has one of those faucets you have to keep pushing down, so there's not much water either. That's just as well, the hand dryer (you thought maybe they'd have paper towels?) being busted. The two of you exit damply, wondering, Can public rest rooms in America really be this bad?

Or let's say you're driving to work when Dame Nature begins to shuffle across your innards in her steel-toed brogans. You stop at the nearest full- service gas station, ten miles down the road, grab the key, open the door and . . . Ay-yi, maybe you can wait after all.

Let's say, finally, that you're walking on M Street (we are in Washington now), in need of relief, when you spot an amusement arcade called Station Break. Blessed salvation! Is this name not synonymous with the dash from the television to the bathroom? Step inside, put a quarter in the Xenophobe game so they can't tell you the rest rooms are for patrons only, then stride to the back, there to be greeted by this sign: 'SORRY!' NO RESTROOMS. Punctuation courtesy of the cosmic joker.

Yep, public rest rooms in America really are this bad. But you already knew that. You've been in cities where they don't exist or can't be found. You've eaten in restaurants where the sign in the grimy broom-closet rest room says EMPLOYEES MUST WASH THEIR HANDS, but you hope they don't because it could only make things worse.

The question is Why are public rest rooms so bad? And today's case study is Washington, home of the best and the worst in public facilities. (The museums along the Mall contain what may be the world's densest concentration of well- kept public rest rooms. And then there is the rest of the city.) With us for a short orientation is Alexander Kira, a professor of architecture at Cornell. Kira is the utter antithesis of public rest-room grunge -- a dapper, courtly figure who carries a silver case for his imported cigarettes and keeps a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He's the author of a highly regarded study, The Bathroom, and he's in town for a convention about bathrooms in the home.

"The home market is glamorous, and consumers spend a lot of money on it," says Kira, about to embark on a tour of unhomey rest rooms at National Airport. The public rest room has no such constituency, just a lot of people "who may be there once for three minutes, never to return." Since most people avoid commenting on the facilities, or subscribe to the polite fiction that they haven't visited them, any establishment can safely relegate public rest rooms to a dank and mingy corner. They double as storerooms or janitors' closets.

For a young architect starting out, says Kira, "being given bathrooms is like being given latrine duty in the Army." He surveys the resulting mistakes in a men's room at National: no shelves for hand luggage above the backs of the toilets -- ideal for thieves who can grab a bag from under the stall door when you're least able to fight back; a urinal that projects into the narrow aisle, so everybody has to sidle past; a sink counter that is too spacious -- good at home, but here just someplace to slop up as you go drip-dropping in search of the mislocated hand dryer.

Let's not be fussy, though. At least the airport has rest rooms. Many gas stations, especially self-service, cashier-booth pumpers, no longer do. Visitors who wait till they're in the city's elegant subway system are also reduced to toe-tapping: "There are no public rest rooms, and there haven't been as long as I've been here," an employee declares indignantly, when a patron begins to beg. A Metro spokesman avers that rest rooms would be an invitation to "crime, vandalism and all kinds of other things you wouldn't want to discuss in mixed company."

The Metro system does, however, have elevators, which at least smell like rest rooms. Urine has rusted out the steel floors in many of them, says a man with the unfortunate job of maintaining the elevators, and management is now installing cameras to catch people in the act. "It's not just homeless people. Everybody's doing it."

The tour adjourns to the Martin Luther King Memorial Library downtown, a large, gloomy building in the soul-crushing modernist style. Here the search for a rest room takes on a literary character, mainly Kafkaesque: a visitor finds the men's room down a darkened corridor on the third floor, just past the security cameras, but it's locked and a sign on the door says AFTER 5:30 USE MEN'S ROOM ON A-LEVEL.

A librarian supplies directions: take that elevator there, cross the lobby, take another elevator to A-level, and, bingo, you're there. But the second elevator has a sign on it: OUT OF SERVICE. PLEASE USE ELEVATOR AT OTHER END OF BUILDING. The stairs are handier, but they lack directional signs and so lead the uninitiated to an underground garage. Back up one flight, through a vast, empty room, into another room containing only a security desk (unattended), just in time to see the ostensibly broken elevator arrive (let's call it Kira's law: cosmic jokers all come out when you need a rest room). The stalls in the men's room have no doors, half the lights are out, and there are too many people hanging around doing nothing in particular. Upstairs, the guards explain that the men's room is a favorite spot for sexual assignations. Another men's room, on the second floor, had to be closed when patrons of the nearby children's reading room complained about what they saw.

Elsewhere, street people are said to be the problem. "We had a woman in there one day," says the owner of a gas station just off Capitol Hill. "They saw water running under the door. She was giving herself a bath right out of the sink." But he is an optimist ("At least I got a clean floor"), and he still provides rest-room keys, selectively. Other businesses put their rest rooms permanently out of order.

"What's happened is that the number of homeless has mushroomed, and we haven't come to grips with that," says Mitch Snyder, a political activist. "So the response is to decry the fact that they use the rest rooms, shut the rest rooms, and then be outraged that they defecate and urinate in the streets." When street people started to use part of a Metro station at Farragut West as a nighttime rest room last year, the Metro responded by fencing off the station at night. "We said, 'Why not install a public rest room?' " says Snyder. "They said that was a terrible idea." Snyder proceeds to make some cogent remarks on the all-American ability to overlook consequences -- whether of our normal bodily functions or of an abnormal housing shortage.

Indeed, Denny Guss, who cleans the men's room at Union Station, says the homeless are overrated as a problem, compared with this knack for overlooking consequences. "Let me lay the worst people on you," he says. "It's the people with the business suits and the attache cases." Reola Hunter, who cleans the women's room, concurs: "They don't clean up after themselves. They ! look at you like, 'You got to do this. You're nothing.' "

Alexander Kira has no great solution to all this. "Values! Values! Values!" he declaims, professorially. "If everybody would be a little more careful, a little more thoughtful of other people . . ." California is attempting to correct the shortage of public rest rooms with a law, now on the Governor's desk, that would require new gas stations near highways to have them. It has also passed legislation aimed at alleviating that bane of both sexes -- "inequitable delays" in women's rooms, where the number of stalls seldom equals the total of urinals and stalls in men's rooms. But nobody's about to make a national campaign out of personal hygiene and the public rest room.

For now, to paraphrase the television commentators, two things are certain. And if by some awkward circumstance, you find either of these certainties overtaking you in a public place, your best bet is to wait (if you possibly can) till you get home (if you have one). This is, apparently, the American way to go.