The “clicks” you hear round city are the sounds of “public” bathroom locks snapping shut. The Nice Bathroom Lockdown is gathering steam as companies defend their bogs, and their prospects, from the insane, incontinent souls who transfer in and depart them unusable and disgusting for everybody else.
Starbucks is the most recent chain to announce that its places nationwide are henceforth off-limits to loiterers, drug customers, panhandlers, and toilet vandals.
Limiting bogs that had been beforehand actually “public” is often performed within the identify of offering higher service to paying prospects.
In fact, it has one function: to maintain the riffraff out. New York Metropolis all the time had avenue lunatics, however the present breed is far more violence-prone and inclined to grab public bogs for drug-taking and all method of delinquent antics.
The brand new rule impacts about 170 Starbucks retailers within the Large Apple, of a complete of greater than 15,000 within the US.
The java-flingers clearly had sufficient of the coast-to-coast injury attributable to its open-to-all coverage in cities together with Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle that suffered repeated robberies and murders.
“No buy wanted” for lavatory use was the brainchild of Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who as soon as had the even dumber concept (shortly dropped) that baristas ought to have interaction prospects in conversations about race relations.
I complained in a narrative seven years in the past that Starbucks’ resolution to open the bogs to everybody, buyer or not, was ignored at many Manhattan places.
I griped that many places discovered methods to maintain the supposedly public bogs off-limits. Managers claimed they’d damaged plumbing or blocked doorways for “development.”
However in 2025, I can solely ask: what took them so lengthy to return to their senses and reserve the loos, seats, and ready areas for paying prospects solely?
The lock-it-up spirit additionally pops up at rising numbers of Large Apple accommodations, shops, and eating places.
The bogs that had been till lately open to all at The Pierre, Omni Berkshire, and the Sheraton New York now are barred to outsiders; resort visitors should use a code or room-card swipe to enter.
The Canal Avenue Meals Corridor now requires bathroom customers to punch within the code proven on their receipts. The identical’s true at Barnes & Noble shops — which had been my frequent go-to’s when nature referred to as — and at myriad fast-casual cafes.
Anybody who spends time on the road and hears nature’s name can attest to creating comparable grim discoveries.
As any determined one that’s tried to entry an unlocked public bathroom is aware of, the dear few obtainable are monopolized by vagrants who lock themselves in for for much longer than biology requires.
The MTA has stored bogs open to everybody at 122 stations. The fearless soul that I’m, I often use them however greater than as soon as fled from those at Fulton Middle, Broadway Junction in Brooklyn, and Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island the second I walked in; the raving madmen within the stalls had been an excessive amount of for my ears.
So long as our elected officers and dimwitted homelessness “advocates” refuse to take away the menaces off the road involuntarily, we’ll have fewer and fewer locations to alleviate ourselves as companies resolve the dangers of getting bogs are too excessive.
In the meantime, “specialists” falsely blame the shortage of bogs in parks and on streets on excessive prices and bureaucratic crimson tape concerned in constructing them.
New Yorkers have ceaselessly grumbled that our metropolis doesn’t have practically sufficient public bogs, particularly in contrast with different “world capitals” equivalent to London and Paris.
Our pols after all pay lip service to the shortage.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, for instance, notes that there are a mere 1,100 public bogs for greater than eight million residents — or one for each 6,000 New Yorkers, making us 93rd out of 100 US cities on public loos per capita.
However most elected pols shrink back from advocating for the one motion that may make an actual distinction — eradicating the menaces from the road whether or not they prefer it or not (though Controller Brad Lander lately softened his resistance to the thought). Solely Mayor Eric Adams forcefully requires involuntary dedication.
Gov. Hochul is now on board with the thought — a minimum of on paper — however who is aware of whether or not her notion to amend the state’s Psychological Hygiene Legislation to “tackle gaps within the requirements for involuntary dedication” will go anyplace.
Good luck getting it by means of the woke-driven state Legislature which is principally within the enterprise of constructing life depressing for law-abiding residents.
So, anticipate extra “public” bogs to be off-limits. Be taught to carry it in — or maintain your nostril.
scuozzo@nypost.com
