Mar 29, 2021 3 min read

Twenty years ago, just before the Pirates moved into a new stadium on the North Side, there was a joke going around:

“Hey! Do you know that they’re putting windows above all the urinals in the new ballpark that will give you a view of the diamond?”

“What? Why?”

“Well … it’s gonna be named “Pee ‘n’ See Park!”

Great joke, eh?

But life imitates art: Over near Heinz Field, Jerome Bettis’s Grille 36 has a one-way mirror installed above the urinals in the men’s room, allowing users to look out into the dining room.

Here’s another one for you: A new condo in Boston’s Jamaica Plain development has a bathroom without a door. Only a single vertical pane of frosted glass separates the toilet from the entryway, which looks directly into an adjacent room.

But this is no joke. The not-so-private privy was the subject of a March 4 article on the Boston.com website. The condo is listed for $899,000 and has two more bathrooms on its second level, but the doorless bathroom is on the main floor, suggesting it is likely to be used as a guest restroom. Robert Nichols, the property’s listing agent, told Boston.com, “The toilet being exposed like that is what really catches people off guard and makes them really uncomfortable.” I can see that.

Most of us probably have always lived in homes where every bathroom had a door – sometimes a lockable one. Although I grew up 35 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, my childhood home had one bathroom with a door on its main floor and what’s commonly called a “Pittsburgh Potty – a single toilet ensconced under the basement stairs. There was no door, but Mom hung a curtain to close off the space even when no one was using it. Mom also insisted that toilet seats and lids be kept down at all times, but not because she feared falling into the john in the dead of night if one of the men in the house left the seat up. Rather, she feared members of her church might arrive unannounced and mistake the gaping maw of our toilet for the gates of hell. Mom was easily embarrassed, I guess. Still, I don’t recall this scenario ever playing out on “Father Knows Best.”

I’m no prude. As a musician, I’ve been forced to change clothes in a restroom so often that hearing the term “toilet water” immediately conjures the scent of those little pink urinal cakes. And I’m told that in China, public toilets are of the squatting variety and most often are housed in cubicle-like spaces with no doors. In Tibet there are no walls between squatting toilets.

I wrote a few years back about the installation of public urinals in Paris as a means to stem the tide of men peeing in public, doglike, against the nearest convenient object. Public urinals in Paris first appeared in the early 1800s, but the most recent iteration drew outrage from some who said installation of male-only stations was a sexist move. I view it ore as an accommodation. Pee? Oui!

But some things are better left unseen. I doubt I’d use a doorless bathroom or a street urinal unless I had no other choice.

If I visit China, Tibet or Paris, I guess I will have to choose.

It’s a numbers game.