The Beautiful Bathrooms of Bryant Park

The bathrooms of Bryant Park should not be this clean.

These are public restrooms, after all. They’re outside the New York Public Library, situated within a public park, in one of the dirtiest cities on planet Earth. By all means, they should be filthy.

I stopped in on my way to the New York Public Library (NYPL). The bathrooms are housed in a large stone structure, like the above-ground tombs in New Orleans. Outside are those metal barricades you see at concerts — this helps organize the throngs of people waiting to get in, which sometimes go 40 deep.

You’re greeted by two attendants. They manage the lines, greet visitors, and clean vigorously. Just behind them, against the wall of the entrance, is a sculptured vase filled with fresh flowers. As you turn inside, you’re in New York’s secret sanctuary: classical music plays softly overhead; original artwork hangs on the walls; not a speck of urine — not even a drop — sits on the floors or seats. It’s even air-conditioned.

This isn’t a bathroom, I thought. It’s Shangri-La.

Pure cleanliness. Pure beauty.

It all started with a rich person.

As the story goes, Brooke Astor was on her way to the NYPL when she had an unpleasant interaction with a “hooligan.” She complained to her good friend, David Rockefeller, who vowed to clean the place up.

This was back in 1979. The bathroom then got it’s most recent renovation in 2017, with Brooke Astor being the muse. “Mrs. Astor was on my mind,” said Dan Binderman of the Bryant Park Corporation, in an interview with the New York Times. “Anybody from homeless to Mrs. Astor could use it.”

Several years and $280,000 later, the bathrooms of Bryant Park are the place to be. According to Curbed, they see 3,266 visitors on average per day. And the city works hard to keep them maintained. Music choice is discussed at length during staff meetings, according to that same Times article. Focus groups were ran early and often, which resulted in installing touch-less sinks. They’ll even send employees to “competing” spaces such as the Waldorf-Astoria, St. Regis, and Plaza Hotel, just to keep tabs on what’s new in the bathroom space.

“People come from all over just to photograph the place,” George told me, who’s one of the bathroom attendants. “It’s not just a bathroom. This is a tourist attraction.”

Basins provided by Toto, a luxury brand

The bathroom is an intensely personal space.

Not only are we fully exposed, but it’s one of our few public refuges. As David Foster Wallace once put it, the bathroom is the most reliable public place for emotional meltdowns. It’s where we go to purge our toxins — physical and mental — before gathering ourselves to face the outside world again.

The bathroom is also a holy space, no pun intended. When one smudges their home (the practice of using sage to dispel negative energies), one is supposed to spend the most amount of time in the bathroom, which has been regarded as “the power center for health and wellness.”

Throughout time, the bathroom has largely remained the same: a sink, a toilet, and maybe even a mirror (this, as I’ve been told, is not necessarily true for women’s bathrooms, which contain comforts and wonders beyond one’s imagination). Now, it seems we’ve reached a technological zenith: we have TVs encased above urinals; toilets that warm, flush, self-regulate, even tickle our nether regions; floors can clean themselves, such as this bathroom in Stockholm.

You’ve got bathrooms with heated seats, you’ve got bathrooms with no seats (hello, Thailand). You’ve got trains in Indonesia where — graphic warning — one sits on a wooden slat with a hole as pigs will wait and catch your dangling logs before they even hit the ground.

Other innovations include: the foot-door opener, a possible COVID byproduct where your foot can hook a metal edge at the base of the door, allowing you to exit without touching the handle; the electric hand-dryer; or even the digitized feedback forms now featured in bathrooms such as New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

Even Larry David had his visions: When designing a cafe bathroom in Season 10 of Curb Your Enthusiasm (see: Latte Larry’s), he not only created a new urinal that prevents splashing, but made the controversial decision to ban defecation (“But Larry,” his architect insisted, “it’s a cafe. We’re serving coffee.” “I don’t care,” Larry retorted. “They can do that somewhere else”).

The flip side, so to speak, would be porter potties, where one has to squeeze in, dare not touch anything directly, and often stare at either a menacing spider in the top corner or that large mushy log that sits stubbornly atop the water (or, even worse, on the seat (true story)). Or there are gas station bathrooms, the sole definition of “neglect,” which chip off a tiny piece of your soul every time you enter.

This makes the experience at Bryant Park all the more remarkable.

George and Colita take care of the bathrooms; at least, that’s who was on duty when I was there. And they take their jobs seriously. “We give people a place that’s clean,” said George, “where they don’t step on stuff, where they don’t get traumatized.”

Being New York City, they do get their fair share of homeless patrons and those who are mentally disturbed. But for the most part, George says, the people are respectful — they do their business and leave it clean: “Only sometimes we get someone really disturbed, and we have to call security.”

Besides cleaning, George and Colita give people get what they need. They pose for pictures. They say hello. They’ll even watch your bikes or your bags if you want to leave them outside.

I asked them, do you take pride in this job?

“Of course we do,” said Colita, with a heavy Jamaican accent. “We sweep. We clean. Of course I do it with pride. This is my job.”

Colita (left) and George

The bathrooms of Bryant Park are the epitome of pride, especially in a city covered in neglect.

New York is a loud, dirty place, with few pockets of peace (and a dearth of public bathrooms to begin with). For those of us living here, we’ll take every moment of refuge we can get. Yet these bathrooms stand for something bigger. If you’re going to build something, build it with beauty; and if you’re going to do a job, then do it pride.

After all, people can tolerate a dirty street. They can stand on a nasty train. But everyone, whether they realize it or not, gets delighted by a sanitary bathroom.