Vintage Public Restrooms

[happyfilmluvguy]

An odd topic, but I have wondered what a public restroom in the 20's, 30's or 40's, even the 50's looked like. I've seen photos of the distinct restrooms during the 60's "white only" and "black only", and only the interior of the "black only" restroom, which was pretty disgusting.

In "The Aviator", Howard Hughes enters a public restroom, supposedly inside the Pantage Theatre. It looked pretty much like one now. Nothing different. I do know that luxurious restrooms, like the ones in ritzy restaurants and five star hotels had a man who gave you a towel to dry your hands with, and beside him, a basket to throw them into when you were done.

Were there public restrooms during these time periods? Were they plain looking like the ones now? Stalls? Urinals? Sinks?

What about ordinary ones? Like one in an office building or a two bit diner?

 

[pretty faythe]

I don't know what public bathrooms looked like back then, but I do know that ritzy hotels still have that towel boy/girl. So do strip clubs (no, I wont say how I know this...lol)

 

[LizzieMaine]

Well, my grandfather ran a 1940s-vintage Texaco station that remained unchanged and unremodeled until it closed in 1981 -- and the restrooms, while spotlessly clean, were very humble. (My first real paying job, at the age of 13, was cleaning those restrooms, so I have very vivid memories.)

They were very simple -- white plaster walls with a wooden partition painted dark green, a painted concrete floor, and a plain white wall-mounted toilet. The sinks had cold water only, and over each sink was mounted a metal Boraxo dispenser -- Boraxo was a dry, gritty, powdered soap, and the dispenser was a sort of mechanical sifter with a lever that hung down below. You'd bang on the lever and a small amount of the powder would sift out. The towel dispensers gave out rough folded-red-paper towels, and there was also a dispenser for "Ajax" brand drinking cups -- which were like flat cone-shaped envelopes with one end open, made of plain unwaxed paper. You had to drink quick before they leaked.

There was no graffitti. If any had shown up, it would have been painted over immediately -- but there never was any. Texaco maintained a "Registered Rest Room" program which actually sent inspectors around twice a year to make sure everything was clean and properly equipped, and we kept ours in full compliance with those standards even after the inspections finally ended.

 

[Lady Day]

Well there WAS a rest room right across from Debose Park here in the citay. It got overused if you know what I mean, and was gutted into a covered stop for the N Juda train.

LD

 

[RedPop4]

There are a couple of halls around the main quadrangle at Louisiana State University, where the restrooms remain largely unchanged since the buildings were constructed in the late 1920's early 1930's. They have marble partitions, good solid tile walls, old, solid fixtures with curves and edgings that leave no doubt as to their provenance, and tile floors as well.

Allen Hall is one, and, I want to say, Audubon Hall. Stubbs Hall is on that side of the quadrangle, too. It was built in 1924 and Audubon in 1923.
Prescott Hall is in there too, same era.

 

[CharlieH.]

Remember the restaurant scene in The Godfather? The joint's restroom is quite prominent. Wooden stalls, toilets with high tanks and a chain, pipes all over the place, light yellow walls, all dimly lit by one or two bare bulbs. If I remember correctly, there's also a bathroom scene in The Sting, and it was quite similar.

And remember - No liquid soap dispensers! (This one escaped the set designers on The Aviator)

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

Remember the restaurant scene in The Godfather? The joint's restroom is quite prominent. Wooden stalls, toilets with high tanks and a chain, pipes all over the place, light yellow walls, all dimly lit by one or two bare bulbs. If I remember correctly, there's also a bathroom scene in The Sting, and it was quite similar.

And remember - No liquid soap dispensers! (This one escaped the set designers on The Aviator)

I've never seen the Godfather, but will have to look into it one day.

With the Aviator, I knew the moment that scene came up, that they just used an ordinary restroom. I didn't know much about detail but it looked like any one I've seen, and that was enough for me.

Wooden stalls sound right, since there was no plastic. I guess tile floors have always been the design of a restroom.

 

[dhermann1]

Urinals!

Wow! How often do you get to discuss urinals as a work of art in public!? God bless Fedora Lounge! Guys, remember the old floor standing urinals in old hotels and train stations? About 10 or 20 in a row, all with patina-ed heavy off white porcelain. If you're not old enough to remember them, well, you're not old enough to remember them. But I always thought they had a massive grandeur to them. Built to last, like the pyramids!

 

[Feng_Li]

The sinks had cold water only, and over each sink was mounted a metal Boraxo dispenser -- Boraxo was a dry, gritty, powdered soap, and the dispenser was a sort of mechanical sifter with a lever that hung down below. You'd bang on the lever and a small amount of the powder would sift out.

Boraxo! My high school shop had those dispensers at the wash stations...I really liked it, because it made it easy to scour the grease and crud from your hands.

 

[BegintheBeguine]

The main building of the public library, built in the 30s, had soap LEAF dispensers in the ladies.' Thesoap smelled good. It worked like the toothpick dispenser with the arm, I think.

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

Wow! How often do you get to discuss urinals as a work of art in public!? God bless Fedora Lounge! Guys, remember the old floor standing urinals in old hotels and train stations? About 10 or 20 in a row, all with patina-ed heavy off white porcelain. If you're not old enough to remember them, well, you're not old enough to remember them. But I always thought they had a massive grandeur to them. Built to last, like the pyramids!

I'd like to see photos of this. If anyone can find vintage public restroom photos, please post them.
There should be at least one classic film that has a scene in a public restroom

 

[The Wingnut]

The full height urinals and Boraxo soap dispensers really aren't that distant of a thing. They had them in my schools all the way through high school, and even in a few spots in college in the older buildings. That was only 10 years ago.

I suppose expense killed the urinals, they had to be built into the walls and floor. The advantage was that urine from those with bad aim didn't ruin the adjacent wall, and it was far easier to clean...some bathrooms from the golden era seemed to be built in a manner that would lend them to being hosed down. Occasionally I'll run into a defunct Boraxo dispenser in an older gas station bathroom. Never did like those, messy and gritty, and they always seemed pretty beat up. They did their job, though.

 

[Haversack]

Someone already mentioned the use of sheets of marble as stall dividers. Expensive as this might seem to us today, this was the standard in most medium to high-end public buildings. It was thought to be more sanitary, was easy to clean, and did not age quickly given the harsh chemical environment. Nowadays, partitions are hollow steel panels with an epoxy enamel finish for the same reasons. But they are much cheaper and do not last as long.

Which brings us to another difference between then and now. Nowadays, each urinal is walled off seperately by a partial partition. This has been a growing trend in public design since the early 1980s. In the '20s-40s, the bank of urinals would have all been open. Besides those full-hight porcelain urinals imbedded in the floor, the use of one long communal trough was also common. It was also cheaper than a bank of individual fixtures. Again, this type of fixture has pretty much fallen by the wayside in the present day's quest for the illusion of privacy and abandonment of the Commons.

Haversack.

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

I don't blame them for wanting more privacy.

When I met with some of the loungers in The Oviatt building in Los Angeles, they too have a restroom, but the bottom floor itself is now a restaurant and was originally a men's clothing store. I'm wondering how long those restrooms have been there, had they ever been there in the past, and if so, how much they've changed.

I don't know why anyone would take a photo inside of a restroom, so I really doubt there are any existing, though people took photos of random things and places all the time, just like many do now. I bet there's a classic movie that has one scene in a restroom, even if it's a built set, it still tells what they might have looked like then.

Someone ought to write a book.

"Toilets and Tissues: The History of Public Restrooms"

Here's a website I came across, no photos though. americanrestroom.org/

 

[MAGNAVERDE]

When it was built, the 1931 Merchandise Mart here in Chicago by Graham, Anderson, Probst & White was the largest commercial building in the world, an essay in Alfred Shaw's wonderful hard-edged Art Deco with an interior featuring walls & faceted columns in filled travertine, square, upside-down-wedding-cake fixtures in bronze & milk glass, and, on the exterior, running around the building's papapets, a line of gigantic sculpted heads of American Indians, in reference to the building's commercial function & riverside location near the site of Chicago's first trading post on the Chicago River.

http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a286/MAGNAVERDE/Desk--martheads.jpg

Most of the original restrooms have been remodeled over the years, but others remain, and they still boast their original terrazzo floors, wall dados & full-height stall dividers of pink Tennessee marble & massive wall-mounted fixtures.

The only other public restroom I can remember is the one designed--also by Alfred Shaw--to match the esthetics of an intimate, off-the-beaten-track Streamline Moderne theatre in the Museum of Science & Industry. The last time I saw it, 5 or 6 years ago, it was still a beautiful space, with cream color walls, hexagonal white tiles on the floor, panoramic mirrors flanked by flattering pink 1-inch Lumiline tubes, high stall dividers of 1-inch black Vitrolite and a high dado of vast sheets of the same material, the fast-mutiplying reflections of which seemed to expand the room's dimensions into infinity. I'll tell you, regular black commercial-style toilet seats have never looked as elegant as they do in a setting like that. And unless my mind deceives me, when I was in 7th grade, the look was even more glamorous, like a set for a Fred Astaire movie, because somewhere in there, I remember gigantic slabs of polished cream-color fossil limestone.

Anyway, I grew up in a small farming town in the middle of the corn belt, and this space, small as it was, was my first exposure to a high-style interior of the inter-wars period--or, at least, one that hadn't been wrecked by a later amateurish attempt at staying current with the latest styles. Needless to say, I was an instant convert.

Since there was as yet no such term as Art Deco, and I'd never seen Vitrolite, I didn't really have the words to describe it, so when I got home I painted a tempera impression of the room for my parents--I was already an artist--and later on, when we went to see my grandparents in the town where my parents had grown up, and where i had had lived till i was ten, my dad took me down to a tavern on the main drag that I'd been into for lunch with my grandfather a bunch of times, but my dad spoke to the bartender, who then opened a side door and we climbed a curving staircase to a large room that took up the whole second floor. The windows had some sort of weird frosted glass, but the room was lit with hidden lights near the ceiling and from inset panels behind the bar. The walls were covered with more Vitrolite--cherry red & gray, this time--sandblasted with industrial scenes: belching smokestacks, giant kettle pouring hot metal or molten glass & gigantic asemblage of cogs & machinery and a cluster of workers that looked more like the Rockettes than the mechanical drones of the underground city in Metropolis. Even so, and even under a thick layer of dust--it looked like it hadn't been used in years--the place was incredibly cool. The men's restroom was more red & gray Vitrolite, in horizontal bands. The women's was gray- & peach-tinted mirror.

My mom's contribution was a trip to a dress shop downtown which had a mirrored stairway with a reeded-glass balustrade, and tucked away at one side, a round fitting room lined with mirror adjoined by a tiny powder room with powder-blue walls, a Modern Classic mural--of, I know now, Diana & her retinue--done in white & silver, and a broad white marble sink with legs of clustered glass rods bound with silver metal.

The glass-walled party room above the bar disappeared when a big chunk of downtown was leveled for an urban renewal project, and the swanky dress shop, being already on the decline when I first saw it, went through a slew of new incarnations, none of which seemed to last very long, so Diana's mirrored stair is lone gone, I'm sure. But they were there long enough to burn a permanent image into my brain, and that's what counts.

magnaverde.

 

[TailendCharlie]

Whats your aim

Wow! How often do you get to discuss urinals as a work of art in public!? God bless Fedora Lounge! Guys, remember the old floor standing urinals in old hotels and train stations? About 10 or 20 in a row, all with patina-ed heavy off white porcelain. If you're not old enough to remember them, well, you're not old enough to remember them. But I always thought they had a massive grandeur to them. Built to last, like the pyramids!

Kind of like this?www.urinal.net/ freiberg_public/:beer:

 

[Dinerman]

this is vintage.

 

[happyfilmluvguy]

Magnaverde, that was a wonderful read.

this is vintage.

Now that is a restroom. :eusa_clap

 

[Miss 1929]

Next time I go to Bimbo's 365 Club

in San Francisco, I will take pictures! I don't know about the men's room, but the ladies' is untouched since the 40s (except spotlessly clean) and is wood paneled, has peach mirrors, a lounge with a comfy sofa, an attendant (in a maid's uniform) with towels, sewing kit etc., and real, fresh orchids!
Luckily the rest of the club is just a swell, or I would spend the whole night in there...

 

[Bill Taylor]

Ah, Bimbos 365, a San Francisco institution. Haven't been in a good many years. For a while, it was not open often. But anyway, a good many years ago (can't remember exactly when, probably 50's up to 60's), Bimbos had large aquariums built into several walls, mostly floor to ceiling. And in those tanks, swimming around in brief swin suits were a number of good looking girls. They were called "Bimbos". And thus, we had a new descriptive word added to the English Language still used today. And my wife says I am in trouble for posting this!

Bill