I didn’t even know these things existed, especially as far back as the 1880s. I thought people just pissed in the street back then, like they do in Atlanta today?
I appreciate the workmanship; we don’t even bother to build houses as nice as the pee huts of the late 19th Century. They were reportedly called Temples of Convenience, or Temples of Relief. Fancy, fancy. “I say, I must beg your indulgence while I pop into a temple, or else I will surely soil my pantaloons.”
Some look like upgraded versions of one-holer outhouses, which I could embrace in an emergency. But others appear to be larger and more menacing. After the sun goes down, I have a feeling some of those Temples of Relief turned into Sheds of Power-Sodomy. Perhaps I’m just paranoid, but I’m envisioning Victorian men with handlebar mustaches emerging from those things in tears, holding bloody rags to their asses. As Jack the Butthole Ripper silently slips away into the darkness and fog.
Have you ever encountered a street urinal, similar to the ones in this gallery of photos? It surprises me they were so forward with it, and put these Urination Shacks right out on public thoroughfares. As late as the 1970s they wouldn’t even show a toilet on American TV; I thought the Brady kids must have used the sink or a Folger’s can. Such blatant acknowledgment of bodily functions, during the 1800s, seems improbable to me.
Props to these guys for their superior work chronicling the places we peed during days gone by!
Just where was the urine going back in the olden days? We are just talking about a hole in the ground back then?
Happy New Year y’all.
When I was a kid, and visited England in the ’50’s, these were all over everywhere. Nobody thought anything about them, and pee’d freely. It was just the way it was.
Now that I am older, need to piss more often, and am given less warning than when I was younger, I can see the wisdom in constructing one of these lovely rest rooms every two miles of every major street. Personally, I’d only need to use about one out of three in the course of my daily sojourns, but that would still leave two thirds of them available at all times for other old men. Let us now praise famous architects and engineers.
jtb
Jeff…
With regard to frequency of publication and format: I think the comments were tailing off because of the less-than-predictable publication schedule. I know your life is trying to kill you and make it look like an accident, and I actually notice that your posts simply don’t have errors and are clear and cogent, which means they’ve gone through multiple rewrites and multiple edit cycles. The time it takes to publish one of your updates would stagger people who have never published.
I further think that when you don’t have time to send a letter, a postcard is a reasonable alternative. Maybe the way your life works right now, the best you can do is one big update a week and four postcards. I have no idea how other reporters will react to that, but I’ll be in there commenting as many days as seem appropriate.
I’m sorry your life is a traffic jam. I hope it will get better soon.
John
I wondered if anyone was going to mention the format change. I felt like I was part of a web version of the emperor’s new clothes.
I don’t do well with change, I recently left the “new” yahoo mail, hate Windows 8 that I was forced to when my laptop shit the bed and dislike the new google maps.
Of course I still miss the motherfucking bowl of corn.
Urinals, because ladies didn’t have bodily functions? It’s tough being so delicate.
Could you imagine being in a 19th century English dress and having to pee? What a nightmare to get in and out of. No wonder women drank out of tiny cordial glasses. I would only want to pee before getting dressed in the morning, and after getting undressed to go to bed.
When I was in Amsterdam I used a street urinal, just around the corner from Anne Frank’s house, that only concealed you from the knees to the chest: You could look passing strangers in the eye as you took a piss. Here’s a photo of a similar one:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/[email protected]/4479196101/
I’ve seen public urinals in Amsterdam and Paris. When I was a wee lad there were pay toilets in the NYC subway, but nothing like this. And of course now that pay toilets are more-or-less outlawed, there aren’t any toilets at all in the subway.
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I think the Heritage Group website you linked to was also built in the 1880s.