New Bill Would Add 4 Public Bathrooms To Wash Heights, Inwood

UPPER MANHATTAN, NY — For years, the discussion has swirled around the need to add more public restrooms throughout New York City. A recently introduced bill from City Council Member Mark Levine looks to do exactly that.

The bill from Levine, who represents a small section of Washington Heights and the majority of Harlem, would bring at least one new public bathroom to every ZIP code in the city — including four in Upper Manhattan.

The bill would require the Department of Transportation and the Department of Parks and Recreation to submit a joint report to the Mayor and the Speaker of the City Council, no later than June 1, 2022, that identified at least one spot in each NYC ZIP code suitable for installing a public bathroom.

The two city agencies would have to consult with community boards and locals when choosing the locations and discuss the costs and challenges associated with installing the public bathrooms.

"This is a public health issue. We had far more bathrooms in decades past open to the public," Levine told Patch. "The result is, particularly during off-hours, there are just no options for public bathrooms. In a city of eight and a half million people. It is a public health issue and it is a quality of life issue."

There are currently around 1,100 public bathrooms for the more than eight and a half million New York City residents, according to Maeve Flaherty, the president of NYC Restrooms4All, a coalition of advocates pushing for more public bathrooms in the city.

To put that number in perspective, there are 30,000 public restrooms for the just over five million people that live in Singapore.

"It creates a lack of access for a wide swath of New York City residents. It affects pregnant people, parents of small children, the elderly, the homeless, this is a significant population of the city that is urgently in need of bathrooms — and that is not even counting the everyday New York City citizen," Flaherty told Patch about the issues created by the small number of available public restrooms.

Bathroom accessibility on the Upper West Side made national news at the end of April when members of the local Community Board 7 almost unanimously shot down a resolution to allow delivery workers the right to use the restroom at local restaurants when picking up food.

Read More: UWS Raises Stink Over Delivery Workers' Restaurant Toilet Pass