American Toilets
Some people have the idea that these pages imply that American toilets are always cleaner and better.
So, here's proof to the contrary in Ray's Pizza place in the East Village in New York.
Places called "Ray's Pizza" are about as thick on the ground in Manhattan as Starbucks. This is a place at 3rd Avenue and St Mark's Place.
The Tai Shan restaurant in Chinatown, Washington DC.
At right is the toilet in Harry's Chocolate Shop (actually a bar) in West Lafayette, Indiana.
It's just as seatless and even nastier than a typical Greek toilet.
And below you can see the ice-cooled urinals and the frequently broken towel dispenser.
Also see:
Here is my toilet, also located in West Lafayette, Indiana.
A friend pointed out some time ago that I really needed to include my toilet in this collection. So here it is.
And then another friend suggested that my Toilets of the World collection was sadly lacking multimedia — what it really needed was a video file. Oh, not just video, but MP3 audio and ringtones.
Well, since downloadable multimedia is an enormously popular concept, and since I'm always interested in further monetization of this site, click here to download MPEG video, MP3 audio, and a ringtone of this very toilet in action!
The U.S. Department of the Interior headquarters in Washington DC seems like a time capsule from around 1945.
This includes their restrooms, featuring the old-style "Watch Your Step" urinals.
They have been updated with infrared motion sensors controlling the flush valves.
The Department of the Interior toilets are of similar vintage.
The horseshoe seat is made of black rubber with a dull finish.
It's probably not as clean as a modern hard-surface plastic, but then that wouldn't be as traditional.
Notice how the stalls have marble walls and dark wooden doors. Classy!
You can visit these restrooms on your way to and from the Department of the Interior museum. Among other things, the museum explains that the department administers mining and oil extraction industries providing the raw materials for such common everyday items as 33-1/3 RPM long-playing records. So, these designs seem very appropriate for the department headquarters.
And just a few blocks away in Washington DC, the Corcoran Gallery of Art has some of the big old trumpet shaped urinals that seem to be from the 1930s or 1940s.
The patterned hexagonal tile floor looks appropriate for that period.
What is it about central Washington DC and antique toilets?
The mysterious Secret Staff Toilet in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA.
Also see the Toilets of Higher Education page for more on this strange toilet.
The mens room at the west end of the Infinite Hallway, room 7-107 in the Rogers Building at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Also see the Toilets of Higher Education page for more on this toilet.
One mens room in the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
Also see the Toilets of Higher Education page for more on this toilet.
One of the toilets at the Hilltop Hostel in Washington DC.
Here's a huge row of portable toilets near the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial in Washington DC.
Notice how the two on this end look unusually wide?
They're wheelchair accessible.
The Staten Island Ferry provides free rides from the lower tip of Manhattan (New York, USA), past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, to Staten Island, and back.
And if you need to go before you board, this is an all-stainless-steel model in the Manhattan terminal.
Also see the Ship Toilet page for nautical heads, and the Stainless Steel Toilet page for similarly metallic toilets.
At Venice Beach (Los Angeles, California, USA) and in need of a public toilet? At left, this is what you'll find.
Also see the Stainless Steel Toilet page for more shiny metal toilets.
This is a pit toilet in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota along the Canadian border.
While National Park Service pit toilets are pretty standardized, in the interest of completeness this one is at a campsite on an island in the northern part of Crooked Lake, around UTM 0589359 5339141.
Also see the Loos with Views page.
Sometimes toilets are modified to other purposes. The Astor Place subway station between Greenwich Village and the East Village in New York was built with a pair of public toilets.
I'm sure those got pretty nasty in the 1970s and 1980s!
That space has been converted to a small shop. Notice the nicely carved stone lintels still in place above the two doors.
See the train toilet page for train toilets still in operation.
The toilet in a washroom on board an Airbus A330 en route from London to Detroit.
One of the toilets against the fuselage skin, not one of the only slightly more roomy center ones.
Why do your ears sometimes feel pressure changes when you flush an airline toilet? Because the vacuum flushing may cause the pressure altitude within the tiny toilet cabin to quickly jump 5 to 20 meters, say from about 2000m pressure altitude to 2015m.
For other odd A330 photographs, see my Gallery of Crash Dump Screens. The seatback entertainment systems run an embedded version of the Linux operating system. The OS is fairly stable, but the application is not.
During the 1970's the U.S. federal government nationalized most all passenger rail service in the United States, forming Amtrak. The resulting trains are nice inside, and along the East Coast they keep to useful schedules.
These, however, are from The Cardinal, which links Chicago and Washington loosely approximating a three-times-weekly schedule, and Chicago and Indianapolis on the other four days. At least the stainless toilets are fairly nice!
A toilet on board one of Amtrak's high-speed Acela trains running between Boston and Washington DC.
A toilet on a MARC (Maryland Rail Commuter Service) train between Washington and Baltimore.
Yes, Greyhound buses have on-board toilets. They have a holding tank with the traditional blue juice. I was surprised to see that the design is just a straight drop down a wide shaft into the tank. I would think that the toilet could get awfully smelly on a long hot trip. There is a small air vent directly to the exterior just to the right of your head if you were sitting on the seat.
The toilet compartment occupies the right half of what would be a full-width rear bench seat and what would be the pair of seats just in front of that on the right side of the aisle.
Note to self — do not sit in the back two rows of a Greyhound bus, where the door to the toilet is directly across the aisle.
Megabus, one of Greyhound's competitors, connects major cities with luxury buses that you can board without venturing into the always dicey Greyhound terminal.
Really, Greyhound's market seems partially based on brand loyalty based on fond memories of rides home from prison.
Anyway, the buses are quite nice, and they include an on-board lavatory. But as you see here, they're very similar to the Greyhound ones.
There are only so many things you can do with the design of a long-haul bus toilet.
The Staten Island Ferry provides free rides from the lower tip of Manhattan (New York, USA), past the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, to Staten Island, and back.
If you need to go before you board, at left is an all-stainless-steel model in the Manhattan terminal.
At right is one of the heads on board the ferry itself.
Also see the Stainless Steel Toilets page if you are interested in that category.
Also see the Toilets at Sea page if you are interested in that category.
New York Water Taxi on the East River between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and its on-board toilet.
Also see the Toilets at Sea page if you are interested in that category.
Rose George's The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters is a fascinating description of sanitation conditions around the world. "2.6 billion people don't have sanitation. [....] Four in ten people have no access to any latrine, toilet, bucket, or box."
In September 2009, Morna Gregory and Sian James published a book titled Toilets of the World. It's pretty much the same theme that you find here — photographs and commentary on other people's plumbing.
| A Sani-Flush blue border indicates a toilet that I've used. |
How long have my Toilets of the World pages been around? I'm not exactly sure, although they started in the mid 1990s as a single page on a Purdue University server. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine lets you see what that looked like as far back as January 17, 1999.
My cromwell-intl.com domain appeared in September, 2001, although the Wayback Machine didn't notice its one enormous Toilet of the World page until January 17, 2002. Some time soon after that I split it into categories, and the collection has grown ever since.
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
