A recent email chides me for avoiding controversial topics in my latest columns, so here's one of a boldness unparalleled in the history of campus journalism. My subject is the state of the Princeton toilet. For many years, my office has been at the top of the fourth entryway of McCosh. To get to the nearest men's room from there has always required stamina and a packed lunch, though things became easier when they installed an elevator near McCosh 50 and when MapQuest appeared on the Internet. I must report that the question of the proximity of a loo becomes more pressing in the normal course of what I shall euphemistically call the maturing process.
I think we need more toilets. The University's attitude appears to be that what we need are more whimsical ones. Elaborate and protracted summer renovations in Dillon Gym achieved two visible results: a refinished basketball floor and, in the Men's Locker Room, a bank of waterless urinals by "Falcon Waterfree Technologies". Yes, waterless, as in they do not flush. For the first week or two there was plastered on the wall above them an article from the Wall Street Journal praising waterless toilets, but I got a better technical account from one of the plumbers doing the installations. This craftsman was a gentleman of a certain age, and to the skills of his profession he added the adornment of a delicacy of speech seldom encountered in the younger generation. "Well, you see," he said, "you drop your — your 'chemicals' in there, and they run down that hole to where there's a pellet with other chemicals, and that takes care of them." He made it sound as though the operation did more than promise bodily relief. In a pinch, it might satisfy the ST requirement as well.
It seems to work, though I remain uneasy about one issue untouched upon by either the WSJ or my plumber friend. Surely, even among omni-competent Princetonians, there will be one or two who lack the marksmanship required to avoid leaving any chemical residue on the porcelain walls of the waterless urinal?
I work a lot in the depths of Firestone Library. I estimate the area of C floor to be about 95,000 square feet, more than two acres, with public seating accommodation for upwards of 200 readers, not counting private offices, seminar rooms and graduate study rooms. For this vast continent of the continent there are precisely two men's rooms and three women's rooms. It is true that I am still sore about the inexplicable suppression of a male facility that long existed near the elevator shafts, but what annoys me more is the mindless disposition of the two side-by-side toilets at the eastern extreme of the one corridor that runs the entire length of the floor. These are essentially identical small, single-occupancy facilities, equipped with effective locks guaranteeing privacy. If you ask me how I know this, I must invoke the protection of the Fifth Amendment to our constitution, for one of these rooms is marked "Men," the other "Women."
I understand the need for sexual segregation in large toilet rooms sometimes used by several people at once. But these rooms are small, roughly the size of a half-bathroom in a private house. In my private house, long shared with a wife and daughter, and now often shared with three granddaughters to boot, I have found it quite manageable for males and females to use the same room, provided only that they do so at different times. It is quite vexing to walk a quarter of a mile to make a chemical deposit only to find the door locked. So why not greatly sweeten the odds by replacing the signs reading "Men" and "Women" with two that read "Toilet"?
Delicacy has inhibited me from taking up this complaint with the local authorities, but last week I was in California for the meeting of the American Printing History Association, many of the members of which are librarians, and I raised it in conversation with one of them who is a friend of mine. She was quite certain in her opinion that the problem reflected not the perversity of library policy, but a governmental mandate. "That will be your local building code," she said. "Building codes demand strictly segregated bathroom facilities." If so, it is the Borough of Princeton that is the author of my discomfort and the object of my pique. Another of the delegates wore matching political buttons on her two lapels. One urged the defeat of Proposition 72, whatever that is. The other read "Keep the Government Out of the Bedroom!" I agree with the sentiment, but at my age I really need one that says "Keep the Government Out of the Bathroom." John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.
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