But subway bathrooms have long occupied an inner ring of the city’s underworld, each grim, battered door a portal to a multisensory nightmare.
Or so we had heard. In 25 combined years in the city, these two reporters had never summoned the courage to enter one.
Recently, though, your correspondents took a whirlwind tour (as others have done) to see if subway restrooms lived up to the horrific hype. Mostly, they did.
The most scandalous thing about New York’s subway bathrooms may be not how gross they are, but how few. By the MTA's official count, there are operative restrooms — at least one per gender — in 51 of the 472 stations. In a system with an average 5.6 million riders each weekday, that’s about one bathroom for every 53,000 riders.
The MTA is working on this. The agency fixed up 12 bathrooms last year. It plans to refurbish an additional 25 this year. “Our customers and employees can all use more open, clean bathrooms,” said Shams Tarek, an MTA spokesman.
To be fair, the bathrooms at the handful of new multibillion-dollar stations on Second Avenue and the West Side are practically pristine. But here’s what you may encounter in the rest of the system.
— Times Square
A/C/E/N/Q/R/W/S/1/2/3/7 lines
Touch of class: A guard sits in a booth and buzzes you in to one of four single-occupancy restrooms, where you have a five-minute time limit.
The stainless-steel sink and toilet gave off a penitentiary vibe, but were reasonably clean. It was the only station on our tour that supplied all the basics of personal hygiene (though none of the stations had tampons or pads).
— 125th Street, Manhattan
A/B/C/D lines
Maximum-security steampunk: In the men’s room, toilet paper rolls hung from a metal handrail in the stall by a heavy chain and padlock. A sticker on the stall door advertised the services of Rikersgoods.com, which delivers packages to inmates of the city jail.
A prospective user walked in but exited immediately.
“It’s not looking pleasant to me right now,” said the man, a 30-year-old welder who gave his name only as Michael. The missing soap dispenser was the deal breaker. “That should be illegal,” he said.
The women’s room floor featured two piles of toilet paper. One was dry, the other was a blob atop a yellowing spread of wet newspaper.
There was no coat hook on the stall door, leaving a reporter to choose between putting her handbag on the floor or clenching the strap in her teeth. A fellow customer left without flushing, glancing at the sink on her way out.
Beside the empty paper-towel dispenser, a hand dryer emitted a feeble puff.
The urine smell in the women’s room was more subtle than in the men’s. It was still staggering.
— Norwood-205th Street, Bronx
D line
The cracked concrete floor of the men’s room looked like it had not been mopped in years. But on the plus side, on the frigid day of our visit, the room was toasty hot.
So hot that someone had wedged takeout Chinese food between the scalding radiator and the wall, possibly to keep it warm — a full container of shrimp-fried rice and brown-breaded nuggets.
“That’s no good,” said the station supervisor, S. Hope, when we brought it to his attention. “That will melt and catch fire.” He threw it out.
In the women’s room, fire safety has apparently been learned the hard way. “No storage within three (3) feet,” read a sign on the floor beside a radiator covered in burn marks. The radiator was working fine, though. The environment was reminiscent of the tropical monkey habitat at the Central Park Zoo.
(Hope said the bathrooms are cleaned three times a day.)
The main door to the women’s room has a peephole to let you see who’s in the hall. But it does not lock. “People hert people,” reads graffiti on the door.
The women’s room offered another unexpected sight: a man, standing at the toilet. He apologized on his way out, but offered no explanation. Nor did he flush.
— 36th Street, Brooklyn
D/N/R lines
Evidently a good place to kick back and relax: A 25-ounce can of malt liquor rested on the toilet in the men’s room, and generously proportioned hermaphroditic portraits graced two walls of the stall.
But the only toilet paper in the room was stuck around the rim of the toilet, perhaps by someone who did not want to sit on the spattered seat.
The women’s room was wreathed in cigarette smoke. There was no toilet paper at all.
— Queensboro Plaza, Queens
N/W/7 lines
The luxury liner of dilapidated subway restrooms. The soap dispenser in the women’s room was half full. Toilet paper flowed freely. The trash can was being used for trash.
In the men’s room, where a pleasantly crenulated green-and-white tile motif adorns the walls, traffic was brisk, and the hand dryer roared like a happy lion. The door latch was too bent to slide, but bent so that it kept the door from swinging open. Good work, MTA.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.