O Bathroom My Bathroom

The best public restrooms in the city are widely considered to be the ones at Bryant Park. I learned this from a bus tour I took in Times Square.

Over the last year+, our family has become adept at finding and using public toilets. Finally discarding pull-ups for bedtime, Simone officially ended her potty training shortly in the new year. Hooray! Still, given that this is all a bit new to her, we are dealing with an unknown quantity when she clutches at her bladder and says, "I have to use the bathroom!"

Quickly and quietly, we enter crisis mode.

Few playgrounds in our neighborhood have public bathrooms, which is a real shame. The Diana Ross Playground just inside the park, uptown from the American Museum of Natural History was our very first, and I still remember taking Simone there during a break in the cold weather just a few weeks after moving to New York City. It's so close to the museum, though, that we have at least once used our membership just to use the bathroom. Membership also took a couple blocks off our cold walk home as Simone and I returned from an adventure at an indoor play space in Harlem.

The Adventure Playground at 69th and Central Park West also suffers for lack of bathrooms, although Le Pain Quotidien, a small cafe inside Central Park just above Sheep Meadow has some, often crowded on sunny days.  Farther down, Heckscher Playground offers one-stop shopping for swings, large boulders, sand pits, AstroTurf and rubberized terrain, water features in the summer and not one but two sets of bathrooms, one inside the official playground area and the other outside. (I don't know why they split it.)

On the east side of the park, the Billy Johnson Playground offers a huge granite slide that shows every evidence of having at one point been a water slide, a stone arch, sand pit, picnic tables, baby swings, but, alas, no bathrooms. Parents in need of immediate bathroom relief have to travel about a quarter mile south to Central Park Zoo, where (yet another) membership hath its privileges, or a quarter mile north to the cafe near the Alice in Wonderland statues.

Of course, at any time, any one of these bathrooms might be under repair, cleaned, occupied by other parents or generally genial homeless people who just need to poop. Here, it helps that Simone is starting to go to the bathroom by herself but is still small enough to accompany me in emergencies.

Near Simone's school, Bleecker Playground recently renovated their bathrooms, which are usually fairly clean and stocked with toilet paper. Neighborhood parents use the playground as a dumping ground for still-functional-but-outgrown toys, which is why I was overconfident about bringing and not locking up Simone's scooter, and also why it was ironic that that very day I had just been talking about how honest most New Yorkers are. One stolen scooter and many tears later, I learned my lesson: bring the lock.

Minetta Playground's bathrooms are the McDonald's next door. That's just how it is.

Washington Square Park also recently updated and upgraded its bathrooms. Simone and I once stood in line for the men's room as two people in wheelchairs inspected it for ADA accessibility. I'm all for fairness, but it's hard to be patient while your daughter's doing the pee pee dance on the ground next to you. They promise a family restroom soon, but not now, so their having said that to me felt like a cruel tease. The new bathrooms are a huge improvement over the old system, which was about a half mile hike to a coffee shop.

Sometimes, businesses will take pity on you. New York City real estate being what it is, not even every restaurant has a bathroom. Barnes and Noble on the Upper West Side put its bathroom right next to the children's section, which to me is a win-win scenario, and vastly superior to the bathroom at the nearby McDonald's, which I hate using even if we ate at McDonald's, which Simone never wants not to do. Starbucks is the weapon of last resort, but, be warned, it's EVERYBODY'S weapon of last resort, which means (more) long lines and/or punch key or token access.