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Restrooms

The Source

We underrate good restrooms. We overlook them. Like the little gal who slaves all day over a French fry vat, we take them for granted. Taking a break from a latte chat at Jacksonville’s Three Legged Dog this week I ventured into the café’s restroom and was struck by the very …well…appropriateness of the little room. I’m not stretching the point to say that it’s worth a visit to The Dog just to see their restrooms. They’re perfect in that they fit their accompanying establishment so beautifully. If you’ve not patronized the downtown’s premier coffee shop, it’s an ornate little jewel on the south side of the square and although it’s not big enough, the traffic patterns sometimes cause you to spill you Espresso, and you often have to wait in line, no architect has come in and tried to improve things over what they might have been a century ago. I love it! A delightful throwback to the days when local architects took pride in decoration rather than the financial bottom line, The Dog is a perfect compliment to the downtown dreamers’ hopes for rejuvenation. Plunk the place down in the middle of Manhattan and you’d be looking at a $4 million piece of real estate. If you do all your personal absolutions at home then perhaps you’ve not noticed the recent trend in restrooms. Almost without exception they’re high tech and sterile… both hermitically and aesthetically. Stainless steel is the marble of the 21st century and it’s obvious in most places that these places were designed more for function than eye appeal. The urinals flush themselves, the water in the wash basin comes on when your hands get near, and the blow drier senses your wet presence and produces a blast of warm air. You’ve gone in, used the facilities, and exited…all without touching anything. I’m sure that the various departments of health are wetting their drawers with excitement at the prospect of an entire season without an outbreak of bathroom-borne plagues, but dog-gone it, where’s the fun in sterility? I once visited the restrooms of Air Japan in the San Francisco airport. Okay, I heard they were worth a visit, so I …well…visited. The Japanese are showoffs. I don’t need music playing while I’m in the restroom. And I’m not referring to little ditties played on an overhead speaker system, I mean music that comes directly from the commodes, accompanied by a row of buttons where you can pick your own type of song. Anything that encourages the guy in the stall next to me to start singing is a bad, bad idea. I stopped in Havana, Illinois, last week and when I walked into the restroom a guy was inside his stall talking. Loudly. Of course the obvious question is “Who else does he have in there?” I assume he was on his cell phone. I’m glad he didn’t sing. You can also choose your own fragrance of room deodorizer in Air Japan’s john. I pushed the button labeled, “lilac.” My grandmother always grew lilacs and I was hoping for a memory-inducing mist of life back on the Pike County farm. What I got was a sinus-engulfing spritz of something from a Tokyo chemical factory. Note: if you are bald you not only smell the offending liquid, but you feel it. I bowed deeply as I backed out of Air Japan’s restroom and vowed to skip sushi for the rest of my trip. It’s simple: the restroom should fit the facility. I’ve been in really dumpy restrooms…the type that looked like the scene of a recent murder, but some of these have been in really sleazy roadside cafes or one-pump gas stations in Missouri. They’re perfect! They fit the place! And on the other side of the gastro spectrum I once used the executive restroom at the Chicago Tribune. Dean Don Eldred took a carload of his journalism students to visit the Windy City and we were treated to lunch at the Trib. The fixtures were gold plated, the toilet seats pure walnut, and you didn’t wrestle a paper towel dispenser to the ground to dry your hands. There was a black-tied man standing there offering you a towel. A right proper tinkle. Which brings me back to the Three Legged Dog, the very epitome of appropriateness. Simple, spotless, and pure 1940’s retro. Small white tiles, classic lines on all the necessary appliances, and a smoked glass door that would make the Great Gatsby feel most at home. Other than a too-modern fixture on the sink, the place is perfect. I wanted so badly to check out the ladies’ room to see if it was similarly appointed to fit the style of the building, but the darned thing is much closer to the customer area and I’d have been found out. A quartet of twenty-something gals were seated near the restroom so I simply asked, “Have any of you been in the restroom?” I could have chosen a better opener. I suppose I’ll just have to guess.