J. Seth Anderson

J. Seth Anderson is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Boston University. His interests are varied and include Urban History, Western History, Russian History, Mormon History, and the History of Sexuality. His dissertation, “Straight Talk: Elite Universities and the Genesis of Gay Conversion Therapy” explores the relationship between academia and the state in creating and reinforcing ideas of sexual orientation change efforts across space and time and how this process made visible the abstract tensions between “expert authority” and individual choices related to sexual identities. He completed his MA at the University of Utah where he researched the history of HIV/AIDS in the state of Utah and its effects on individuals, families, medical care, and activism. In 2012 he started a tea business in Salt Lake City that he sold in 2017. In his free time, he likes to play piano. He and his husband, Dr. Michael Ferguson were the first same-sex coupled legally married in Utah in December 2013.

Urban Reforms and the City Cesspool: The Failure of Salt Lake City’s Comfort Stations, 1913-1962 

Salt Lake City joined the ranks of New York, Chicago, Boston, and Los Angeles when the city’s first underground public restroom, known as a comfort station, opened to the public at noon on December 23, 1913 at the corner of State and 300 South Streets. [1] Civic leaders hoped that these underground restrooms would demonstrate that Salt Lake City could build the modern, progressive infrastructure associated with world-class cities. At a cost of $10,000 the city spared no expense in construction and aesthetic design. [2] White enamel covered the walls and ceilings throughout the men’s and women’s restrooms while small, white hexagon-shaped tiles covered the floor. Slabs of polished marble supported by metal rods anchored to the walls and floor formed the divider panels between the stalls. Dark wooden doors completed the stalls and created a visually striking contrast to the interlocking mosaic of carbonate crystals in the marble. Both the men’s and women’s station included pedestal sinks with an ornamental faucet and each boasted a state-of-the-art ventilation system that could change the ambient air every five minutes. [3] Thick glass squares built into the sidewalk overhead created a large skylight allowing soft, natural sunlight to flood the space during the day, while stylish overhead light fixtures hung from the ceilings to illuminate the restroom at night. A reporter from The Salt Lake Tribune described the restroom as, “the most up-to-date and complete to be found in any city in the United States.” [4]

Across the nation politicians and reformers championed the efforts to build public toilet facilities not only to showcase the modernity of a city but also to increase sanitation and enhance personal cleanliness hoping to “refine the inner character of the citizen,” [5] relating the body to the body politic.   

But comfort stations turned out to be complete failures. Peter C. Baldwin has demonstrated how across the United States the public restrooms did not inspire good behavior but rather seemed to bring out the worst in people. In some cities muggers stalked their victims near comfort stations, others stole brass fittings or simply trashed the spaces by overflowing toilets, breaking mirrors, and wasting paper towels and toilet paper. [6] Commenting on the public restrooms in Manhattan’s subways, the New York City Health Department declared in 1920 that the abuse of the comfort stations was “a sad commentary on the decency of some people, and an example of their lack of consideration for the rights of others.” [7] Besides the violence and vandalism, the semi-private/semi-public spaces became locations where some men met for clandestine sexual encounters. A 1937 master’s thesis from the University of Utah titled The Invert Personality noted how “inverts” in Salt Lake City used the comfort stations for sex. [8] Without onsite management, comfort stations in Salt Lake City as well as in other cities around the country declined into squalid, dangerous, vice-ridden places most people avoided if possible. 

Baldwin has argued that comfort stations represented “a new relationship between public authority and the private body.” [9] In many cases this seems to be true, yet in Salt Lake City this does not appear to be the reason for their construction. Instead, this paper argues that Salt Lake City’s Progressive Era reformers and politicians invested in comfort stations to reform the image of middle-class Utahns in the minds of white, Protestant Americans who did not live in the state. Both Mormons and non-Mormons had a stake in this project. City leaders invested large sums of money to build comfort stations so that the city would appear cosmopolitan and progressive. The locations where the city chose to build comfort stations reflected these priorities. Located in the central business district, comfort stations served the needs of tourists and middle-class workers and shoppers. Unlike reformers in New York who urged the city to construct comfort stations in slum districts because those locations had no plumbing or sanitation, reformers in Salt Lake City did not concern themselves with the needs of immigrants and working-class people living in the impoverished community on the Westside. The desire for middle-class Utahns to be assimilated into the American mainstream drove reform efforts, including the construction of comfort stations.  

This paper contends that examining smaller American cities “allows us to investigate the complexity of modernizing America on a more manageable scale” as Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello has written. [10] This method allows the differences and similarities to come into sharper focus. Compared with reformers in cities of similar size, Utah’s reformers and politicians did not take an anti-capitalist position as did the reformers of Nell Painter and Robert Johnston’s Portland, Oregon. [11] Rather Utah reformers align much more closely to the “bureaus of efficiency” that Mordecai Lee has identified. [12] Other questions remain. Did the tensions and animosities over class, race, and immigration function differently in Utah? Did the Mormon Church exert as much influence in politics as is often assumed or did a politically powerful, anti-Mormon politics prevail in the city? A complete answer to these questions is out of scope for this paper, yet by examining the construction of comfort stations in Salt Lake City, this paper offers some preliminary answers about how a distinct, but less rigidly defined class and racial boundary shaped policy making and how even though Salt Lake City had a large Mormon population, Church leaders during these years did not dictate the city council’s agenda.

The majority of studies about the Progressive Era have overlooked the history of Utah and Salt Lake City. [13] Historian Jan Shipps has noted how Western History has been studied in such a way that if mapped would resemble the shape of a doughnut with the Great Basin region as the doughnut hole. [14] For most of the twentieth century, scholars studying Utah history produced work prioritizing Mormonism in Utah, effectively obscuring the richness and diversity of the state. For example, Juanita Brooks’ groundbreaking book The Mountain Meadows Massacre published in 1950 and Leonard Arrington’s 1958 book Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints 1830-1900 emphasized the influence of Mormon Church leadership in politics, culture, and economics. [15] With notable exceptions, amateur and professional historians alike undertook projects⎯often about Mormonism or polygamy⎯with a Mormon audience in mind. Only within the past few decades has the field broadened to include studies on the environment, Native Americans, race, urban history, and labor history in Utah. [16] One goal of this essay is to help shrink the doughnut hole by situating Progressive Era Utah into a broader national and transnational context. 

Where does Utah generally and where does Salt Lake City specifically fit into understandings of the Progressive Era? To begin, as historian Rebecca Edwards writes we should “perhaps think of a ‘long Progressive Era’ extending from the myriad initiatives of Reconstruction to those of the 1910s.” [17]

Utah fits well into this model because by the mid- and late-nineteenth century Utahns had dealt with many issues that would become pillars of the Progressive Era. For example, Utah women secured the right to vote in 1870, a privilege they enjoyed until the passage of the antipolygamy Edmunds-Tucker Act rescinded the right in 1887. [18] The ratification of the Utah constitution in 1896 restored the right to vote and even included an equal rights amendment. [19] Until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Utah women like Martha Hughes Cannon and Emeline Wells played prominent roles in the Suffrage movement. [20]

The people of Utah engaged with other Progressive Era issues as well. Prohibition came to Utah but later than it did in other states. Two statewide prohibition bills failed in 1909, opposed by Republicans, and not until 1917 did the German-born Democratic governor sign a prohibition bill. Two years later, the Utah legislature ratified the Eighteenth Amendment. (However, in 1933 Utah became the 36th and necessary state to vote for the repeal of the Amendment.) [21] Utah’s relationship with race is complex but curiously the Salt Lake City police force hired Paul Cephas Howell, an African American man from Mississippi in 1895. [22]

Utahns debated and rethought structures of government. The business and professional communities supported the replacement of the city council system with a city commission, but this turned into a lengthy battle. Republicans defeated a proposed bill for a commission system in 1907 and again in 1909. Republican Governor William Spry objected to the bills because they contained provisions for the referendum, recall, and initiative, other well-known Progressive Era goals. Stripped of these elements in 1911, the bill passed and created a commission system modeled on those in Texas, Iowa, and Washington DC. [23] As control of the city shifted between political parties and systems of government, the proposal for and construction of comfort stations did not seem to illicit such intensely negative opposition as did other proposals such as street paving and breaking up street car monopolies. Members of the city council and the newly formed city commission all seemed to have agreed on the desirability and necessity for public restrooms.    

By the turn of the twentieth century, Utah showed signs of its enmeshment in international relationships of ideas and social politics. [24] Far from being the rural, isolated, religious fanatics they are sometimes thought to be, the people of Salt Lake City in the early 1900s paid keen attention to issues facing the nation such as immigration, the struggles between labor and capital, city planning, the corporatization of the economy, and suffrage because these issues formed the fabric of social and political life in Utah as well. The people of Salt Lake City also paid attention to national Progressive Era reform projects. For example, in 1910 mayor John Bransford of the American Party⎯an anti-Mormon political party founded in Utah in 1904⎯ delivered a speech in which he declared the “best regulated cities” had built comfort stations and that Salt Lake City should have them as well. [25] Just as reformers in Utah looked east to New York, Chicago, and Boston for inspiration, so too did New Yorkers look east to London and Paris as models to emulate. New York reformers argued that their city should invest in comfort stations lest they fall behind the more advanced European cities. [26] The impulse of civic leaders in Salt Lake City also reflected the fear of lagging behind and led to reforms in the capitol that shaped the structures of government and social relations for most of the twentieth century. For instance, the city commission remained in effect until 1979 when voters chose to switch back to a council system. 

Utah Republicans, Democrats, and members of the American Party did not think of themselves as radical reformers hoping to create a social utopia. [27] Although a small, politically radical element existed within the Socialist Party it never held any real power or lasting influence. At the same time, the Mormon majority in the city hoped to shake off its nineteenth-century image as anti-American sexual misfits, while the non-Mormons in the city wanted less Mormon influence in local politics. The goals of the political parties in combination with the leagues, clubs, and associations organized during the early twentieth century created new alliances as people fought over contested terrain. What they shared in common was that most politicians and activists prioritized the creation of an efficiently managed, business friendly city with the best amenities. They focused on these issues more than on regulating the powerful forces of capitalism or the needs of immigrants and the city’s working poor.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Salt Lake City had become a regional power due to a robust mining industry plus the expansion of railroads. [28] These industries transformed the urban landscape and just like in other cities, intensified the concentration of business and hotels in the downtown core. [29] Men like Samuel Newhouse and Thomas Kearns who had become extremely wealthy through copper and silver mining ventures and had also become politically powerful, invested in the city through architecture. Newhouse built the Boston and Newhouse Buildings, the city’s first commercial skyscrapers on Main Street in 1907 followed by the 12-story Newhouse Hotel across the street in 1912. [30] Kearns built the Kearns Mansion, an opulent French-style chateau on South Temple Street in 1902 as well as the ten-story Kearns Building on Main Street in 1911. [31] 

The opening of the six-story Templeton Building, a hotel on the corner of South Temple and Main Streets in 1890, boasted electricity and indoor plumbing that represented one of “the grandest statements of commercial aspiration.” [32] With the completion of the Oregon Short Line Depot (later the Union Pacific Depot) in 1909 a steady flow of tourists and businessmen poured into the city, creating the need for additional hotels around the central business district. [33] Recognizing an opportunity, the Mormon Church completed construction on the magnificent Hotel Utah across the street from the Templeton Building and next to Temple Square in 1911.  [34]

The built environment also evolved in other significant ways that reflected the diversity of the city’s growing population, as evidenced by the construction of fraternal clubhouses, places of entertainment, various churches, government buildings, and apartments. First, fraternal clubs such as the Alta Club, the Commercial Club, and the Elks Lodge erected large clubhouses for their members in the downtown core. These organizations excluded working-class men from membership so those men instead frequented Salt Lake City’s many saloons, often considering those spaces their own type of fraternal clubhouse. [35] Second, following the lead of other cities, Salt Lake City began construction on a large entertainment venue. The city built the Salt Palace in 1899, which became a gathering place for dances, entertainment, and sporting events. [36] Third, the membership in the Mormon Church remained high, but the city’s other religious communities continued to grow and become more visible. The Episcopal Church completed construction of St. Mark’s Cathedral in 1874 and by the turn of the century, more denominations had built places of worship. The Greek Orthodox and Presbyterian churches moved into new locations in 1905, the Methodists in 1906, the Catholic Church completed the Cathedral of the Madeline on South Temple Street in 1909, and by 1918, the Episcopalians built a larger meeting house. [37] Fourth, the state began construction of the Capitol Building in 1912. Finally, private companies built residential apartment buildings like the Covey and the Buckingham to the east of State Street for the growing population. Meanwhile, the working poor and many of the city’s immigrants crowded into tenements and dilapidated houses on the industrial Westside. [38]

New economic opportunities transformed the city, but also created new problems that demanded solutions. For instance, the population in Salt Lake County increased 205%, more than doubling between the years 1850 and 1900, which created congestion and also made visible the divided lines of ethnic neighborhoods. [39] These divided lines brought racial tensions to the surface, which the city addressed (or rather, ignored) through restrictive covenants that kept most immigrants tethered to the Westside. A second problem, economies of vice, which had proliferated for decades, faced new attacks from reformers. Despite Salt Lake City’s reputation as a religious community, civic and church leaders had struggled since the nineteenth century to keep the region free from booze, gambling, and prostitution, a struggle that continued into the twentieth century. [40] Finally, the city’s infrastructure, specifically the sewer and waterworks systems proved inadequate and in major need of expansion. [41]

Large numbers of people of various ethnic and religious backgrounds settled in Utah’s capital city, more often in the less desirable Westside, which had become the immigrant and working-class neighborhood. Salt Lake City never mirrored New York in its ethnic diversity or population density, but that is not to say only white Europeans dominated the city’s population. Many came from Scandinavia, England, Germany, and Canada for religious reasons, but the booming mining and railroad industries also attracted immigrants from Greece, Italy, and China who came in search of work. By the turn of the twentieth century, Salt Lake City had a small black population, a Chinatown, a Japanese district, and an increasing number of Mexican immigrants. [42] Because these groups had limited options for housing, the majority settled in the more poverty-stricken area of the city. [43] The cheaply built housing rarely included hot water, showers, or toilet facilities and landlords had little incentive to invest in sanitary improvements for the working-class immigrants who rented. [44]

Every part of the city experienced growing pains, but the city’s Westside bore the brunt of the negative consequences of urban growth. The city dumped the garbage, sewerage, and excess water on the Westside, which by 1920 had a population of about 5,000. [45] According to a letter printed in the Salt Lake Herald in 1907 and signed by “One of the Sufferers,” the Westside represented “the tail end and cesspool of our city.” [46] The letter writer penned a rebuke to the city council about the lack of city management in the neighborhood. [47] The letter writer encouraged people living on the east side of Main Street to visit and see the “destruction, filth…” and “suffering of the people and the inconveniences they are placed under in the second and third precincts.” The author recounted how City Creek, a creek that flowed from the mountain towards the Great Salt Lake, constantly overflowed on the Westside creating a “menace to both life and property.” Residents paid taxes “double the amount proportionally to the value of our property” without any representation on the city council. “We are poor people, of the working class,” who felt angry because the city taxed them to build “boulevards, gardens, and buy electric chandeliers to beautify the east side of the city” while residents of the Westside received nothing. The letter writer recognized how the Westside had been cut off from the prosperity of the city because of the resident’s class and racial status. Although impossible to verify, the letter writer may have later been a member of the Westside Improvement League that formed in August 1913. [48]

As the people on the Westside continued to wallow in filth, the Salt Lake Tribune announced in 1908 that Utah’s capital city had been chosen to host the 43rd National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic for the year 1909. [49] The citizens of Salt Lake City understood what a tremendous honor had been bestowed on them by being chosen to host the event, not unlike a city being chosen to host the Olympics today. City organizers immediately went to work making plans to accommodate the anticipated tens of thousands of people who would arrive to stay for a week during the encampment. Two major problems soon became apparent: a lack of adequate hotel rooms and a lack of public restrooms. 

Existing hotel rooms could accommodate only about 7,000 people so organizers solved the problem by asking local residents to rent rooms in their homes to visitors, and also planned to set up cots in schools, boarding houses, and even in train cars. [50] To solve the need for public restrooms, planners first thought that “the toilets in public buildings” could be used, but they decided that temporary and sanitary stations could be built on the street and plumbed into the sewer directly. The temporary stations would include “toilets, washstands and other conveniences,” all of which would be removed at the conclusion of the encampment. [51] The city built seven temporary comfort stations on about a mile-long stretch of the street from 100 South and Main Streets to 700 South and Main Streets. The city built these stations over existing manhole covers and plumbed them directly into the sewers. [52]

On August 9, 1909, the day the GAR ceremony began, the city burst with patriotic decorations. Flags and banners of various sizes hung unfurled across windows, over the sides of buildings, above power line poles, and on the crisscrossed overhead cables above the streets of downtown. An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 people lined the streets to watch the parade and cheer the 5,000 aging Union Army veterans as they marched down Main Street in their Civil War uniforms. The festivities continued for a week with estimates calculating the number of visitors in the city at about 65,000. [53]

A month after the masses of people left town, Salt Lake City found itself in the grip of the most serious typhoid fever epidemic in its history. [54] The Westside reported the city’s highest infection and death rates in September and October with 721 of the city’s 1,173 confirmed cases, leading to 376 deaths. Typhoid had long plagued the neighborhood due to poor drainage and the use of shared artesian wells that often became contaminated. [55] Following the outbreak in September 1909, reformers launched an educational campaign to teach people about sanitation and cleanliness, but also blamed the people living on the Westside for their condition and made little effort to extend sanitation services into the Westside. [56] The decision to build comfort stations in the downtown business district, rather than spend money in a part of town that needed those services suggests that middle-class Utah reformers were preoccupied with their own desire to assimilate into mainstream American culture by being perceived as modern and efficient. 

In 1910, a year after the outbreak, American Party mayor John Bransford affirmed the spirit of the time in a speech to the city council. The questions of what the city needed in order to advance the progress that had already been made “reaches down to the very center of the city’s life and being” he said. The individual “narrow point of view” would not suffice to answer these questions and must be considered from the “broad point of view of community interest.” He hoped that other city leaders would focus on turning Salt Lake City into a “cosmopolis of finance and industry; to make it the center of education, culture, refinement and recreation.” Bransford laid out a set of recommendations for the city council to consider, typical of other early twentieth century reforms, which included expanding the municipal street lighting, extending the sewer system, building a waterworks double its then current capacity, increasing fire stations and the number of police officers, building parks and playgrounds, and finally constructing permanent, underground comfort stations. [57] These changes would alter the landscape of the city by demolishing most of the remaining nineteenth-century infrastructure, housing, and places of business and replace them with cutting edge technology and architecture. With electric lights, an electric streetcar system, expanded trash and sewer improvements, paved roads, and an increase in automobile traffic, the city soon began to resemble many other American cities. Salt Lakers proved they were hard-working, patriotic Americans willing to compete in an expanding capitalist economy. 

The mayor argued that the increasing population and “throngs of tourists” proved the obvious need for comfort stations. The “excellent sewage system” already built in the business district would make construction easier. He closed his remarks by stating the city needed “the realization of our solidarity as a community; the realization of a higher civic consciousness, the preparing of our people for action upon the pinnacle of moral excellence.” The people could be united to work for “the unity, progress, moral, mental and material advancement of a more beautiful, greater, and enduring Salt Lake City.” [58] His proposals focused on the supposed needs of tourists and the middle class. Despite the known living conditions plaguing the people living on the Westside, Bransford proposals failed to explicitly mention any programs to harness the power of the state or city government to provide for those who would have benefited most from the investment.    

By the time Bransford gave this speech, permanent, underground comfort stations had become common in large cities in the United States. [59] New York and Boston had advocated the idea of underground public restrooms and began building them by the late 1890s. [60] Reformers in these cities considered comfort stations prime examples of modernity and a necessary feature of the urban landscape that would promote sanitation, cleanliness, and privacy. Being underground kept the streets free from the public urinals some cities had installed in the nineteenth century and left space open on the streets and in parks. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Seattle, and Washington, DC followed the lead of New York and Boston by building underground comfort stations in the 1900s and 1910s. [61] Salt Lake City joined the list in 1913.   

Reformers in New York completed a report detailing the reasons to build comfort stations and the costs and benefits associated with the construction. In 1897, The Mayor’s Committee for Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations in New York City issued a report titled Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations. In it, the committee identified three specific examples detailing how the absence of comforts stations in New York impeded progress. First, the committee worried that tourists from Europe would think the city provincial because it failed to provide modern restroom facilities, which created problems for public health. Second, the committee identified how public servants like police officers, street sweepers, and letter carriers had no access to restrooms while at work, a situation the city workers described as “distressing.” But the committee also identified a more pressing social problem that the construction of comfort stations could ameliorate. [62]      

The report found that living conditions in the slum districts would improve with the addition of comfort stations. Out of the 480 houses located in the slum districts they surveyed, only 17 had bathrooms, water closets, or privies. The report calculated that the average number of persons to a bathroom in homes with installed facilities was 8.14, a number that represented only an average but that they “thought to be fairly representative of the whole” of New York’s slum districts. [63] With the introduction of comfort stations into these neighborhoods, the “lowest classes” of the city would be introduced to “habits of cleanliness and self-respect” that would have the long term effect of improving the conditions of the tenement houses.” [64] More importantly, “the accommodations should be of the best character, tending rather to bring up the senses of decency in the users [rather] than degrade it.” [65] By identifying neighborhoods most in need, gathering data, and offering solutions to a problem, these reformers epitomized the optimistic nature of people who believed that knowledge coupled with the power of an activist government could improve urban infrastructure. In this case the solution came not through coercive or invasive overreach into the lives of immigrants and the working class, but by constructing a functional waterworks system for their benefit.    

The report concluded that comfort stations solved various problems facing the citizens of the city. Without investment in comfort stations, New York would continue to lag behind European city development, tourists and their money might avoid the city, and civil servants would continue to be inconvenienced while working. Equally important to this committee was addressing the lack of sanitary services in the slum districts and the committee argued the city had a responsibility to provide those services for immigrants and the working class who resided in those neighborhoods. [66]

In contrast to New York, civic leaders in Salt Lake City did not gather data or produce reports on how comfort stations would uplift the residents of the Westside. However, an improvement committee had studied the possibility of building comfort stations and as early as 1910, the city council showed support for building six locations (three for men and three for women), all in the downtown business district. [67] In contrast to New York, civic leaders in Utah adopted only two of the three reasons developed in New York to build comfort stations: a desire to resemble great world cities and to meet the needs of future shoppers and tourists in the downtown business district. Salt Lake City absorbed the expense to put up temporary public restrooms in 1909 when thousands of people visited Salt Lake City for the GAR celebrations, but city leaders rarely, if ever, spoke about absorbing costs to improve sanitation infrastructure outside the downtown business district. To be sure, reformers in New York agreed that tourists would benefit from the existence of comfort stations, but New York’s reformers also identified various problems encountered by the working-class and immigrants that they hoped could be alleviated when the city provided public restroom facilities.  

The Salt Lake City Council (and later the newly formed city commission) approved the construction of comfort stations in the downtown business district. [68] In 1913, the commission allocated $10,000, about $5,000 each, for construction on a men’s and women’s location. [69] Just months after its completion the city allocated an additional $10,000 for a second location to be built in 1914. Several years later the city commission objected to an application for a third location at 200 South and Main Streets near a proposed site of the Continental National Bank on account of the station being too close to the underground bank safety deposit vaults. [70] The city never built a third location, but other cities in Utah including Ogden, Murray, and Provo followed the lead of the capital city by building cheaper, above ground public restrooms throughout the 1920s and 1930s. [71]

Tourists and shoppers in Salt Lake City had several options if they needed restroom facilities while in public spaces. Most department stores of the time offered customers access to a restroom. Two department stores in town, ZCMI to the north and Auerbachs to the south, anchored the central business district. Both establishments exemplified the elegance and sophistication expected of department stores with plush rugs, sparkling chandeliers, fashionable window displays, and electric powered escalators. Both sold jewelry, handbags, men’s and women’s clothing, children’s clothing, luggage, shoes, candy, cosmetics, and appliances. ZCMI had a restroom for customers and Auerbach’s likely did as well. [72] Restrooms in department stores “attempted to replicate the private home in appearance and exclusivity, which reinforced class divisions.” Women preferred this “consumer model of privacy in department store restrooms…” as opposed to the “messy and egalitarian municipal facilities” located in the public sphere. [73]

Hotels, like department stores, often provided restroom services for their guests. By 1913, several sophisticated hotels spread throughout the central business district. A person had only a short walk from downtown to numerous hotels including the Templeton Building, the Hotel Utah, the Temple Square Hotel, and the Volunteer’s Hotel and Restaurant. If necessary, tourists always had the option of running up to their own rooms if they needed a more private restroom. Importantly, both the department stores and hotels provided supervision and had economic incentives to keep restrooms in clean conditions.

Yet with so many restroom options available for shoppers and tourists, the city commission approved construction of comfort stations near the department stores and hotels. A descending staircase to the first comfort station could be found in front of the main entrance to Auerbachs. At first, the comfort station proved popular with the public, which may explain why the City Commission voted unanimously to build a second location. [74] On March 23, 1914, the City Commission authorized construction of a comfort station at South Temple and Main Streets next to Temple Square, the Hotel Utah and kitty-corner from the entrance to ZCMI. [75] This choice to construct public restrooms at these intersections makes sense because both locations would have had heavy foot traffic. 

The steel level design of the two locations differed. Both entrances resembled what looked like an entrance to a subway stop. A person looking at the comfort station entrance on State and 300 South Streets would have noticed a descending staircase surrounded by three short, cement walls on the sidewalk. The second comfort station was much more conspicuous since it looked like an above ground utility closet with a downward slanting roof. The roof covered the staircase and included a skylight. The overhead covering likely helped protect the stairway from rain and snow. Three walls enclosed the staircase with the exception of a wide doorway, which could be shut and locked with an accordion gate. 

Comfort stations produced no revenue for the city and overtime became more and more expensive to maintain. To defer initial costs for upkeep on the stations, the city sought to establish a bootblack stand and cigar case for “accommodation of visitors” at the men’s section of the comfort station and unnamed accommodations “suitable for women” at the other. With the revenue generated from these sales the city planned to hire a caretaker of the station. [76] Anticipating future revenue, the city covered the costs of hiring at least one person to manage the stations. 

The city hired Samuel Steward, a black man from Tennessee, who had moved to Utah by way of Colorado with his wife and children in 1912. During his years in Salt Lake City, Steward helped found the local chapter of the NAACP and the Calvary Baptist Church. Upon arrival in Utah he worked as a laborer to build the state capitol before being hired by the city to supervise the maintenance of the two comfort stations. [77] Steward and his family probably lived on the Westside, but I am unable to verify this. While it is true that most people of color, immigrants, and the working class lived in the Westside, other evidence indicates that some people of color lived on the Eastside, suggesting the color lines in the city were more permeable and not as rigidly enforced as in other regions of the United States. [78]

Evidence is unclear, but Steward worked in the comfort stations probably as a custodian. In the Black Women Oral History Project, Steward’s daughter Arline J. Yarbrough recalled in 1977 that “…it was the typical Negro kind of job and not what we think of as having a very important position these days” but “it was the kind of job that put him in the position to meet a lot of influential people.” [79] Steward “was his own boss” and had authority to hire others, so he hired his sons. [80] Yarbrough also remembered that she and her sisters took turns working shifts in the women’s comfort station “as we became old enough to do this” which suggests Steward held this job for a lengthy period of time. [81] At some point, the city stopped paying for direct supervision, likely as the costs to maintain the facility increased, and Steward lost his job. Without on-site management, the comfort stations soon became unsanitary, vandalized, and known as places of disrepute.   

When first built in 1913, the Salt Lake Tribune declared, “it is proposed to keep the [comfort station] in an immaculate state of cleanliness as an example of sanitary comfort in its most advanced form.” [82] But 32-year later in 1945, the downtown comfort stations had fallen into a “deplorable state” from vandalism and neglect. L.C. Romney, the Salt Lake City Commissioner of Public Safety proposed to renovate them into “clean, dry, sanitary restrooms.” He requested $375 dollars for work that would prevent water seepage from the street into the comfort stations. [83] Unsurprisingly, this insufficient sum of money to upgrade the public restrooms did not transform them into the glorious, shining examples of Progressive Era optimism they had once been nor did the money lessen the overall expenses to maintain.

By the 1960s, the comfort stations no longer served a purpose. The dominance of downtown had declined in the post-war era as businesses and residents moved outside of the city into nearby suburbs. Downtowns across the United States faced a multidimensional, complex, even elusive crisis. [84] Yet downtown Salt Lake City never deteriorated as much as other western cities because the headquarters of a growing, worldwide religion remained centered there. The presence of a corporate church headquarters prevented (or at least slowed) the urban decay other American cities experienced during the post-war era. Eventually the ideas of urban renewal took hold and shaped redevelopment efforts, resulting in the demolition of historic buildings and homes in order to build new sporting arenas, parking lots, malls, and hotels.    

Comfort stations met the same wrecking ball. In the early 1960s, the city’s Public Safety Commissioner Herbert F. Smart recommended that the comfort stations be permanently closed to save the city $3,000 a year on maintenance. Once again, Salt Lakers followed the lead of other cities, this time by closing the urban public restrooms. [85] Effective February 1, 1962, the city locked the doors to the comfort stations for good. 

Forty-nine years after their original opening, the comfort stations in Salt Lake City no longer provided benefits and had become more of a social and financial burden. In Utah, as elsewhere, cities had to decide if public restrooms should be considered a public good that the city should provide, like fire departments or police. Salt Lake City, as elsewhere, decided they were not. Better to continue allowing private businesses to offer restroom facilities to their customers, civic leaders seemed to reason. After all, most people preferred the semi-private restrooms businesses provided, even if they may have resented the requirement to purchase something to access those facilities. 

However, this arrangement created other problems and raised more questions. Who could businesses exclude from using their bathrooms and on what grounds? I can find no evidence that businesses in Salt Lake City enforced segregation (although examples are likely to be found), public and private bathrooms in other parts of the country had long been sites of racial tension and animosity. [86] Further, should private businesses absorb the costs of providing and maintaining what amounted to public restrooms? Those costs to businesses were not necessarily new, however, because businesses had already been providing semi-public restrooms for their customers, even since the time the city built the comfort stations nearly half a century before. 

In the 1960s and 1970s some cities tried to solve the problem by installing pay toilets. [87] This solution exposed not only class differences but also gender inequalities, since women’s pay toilets often cost more than men’s. [88] The Committee to End Pay Toilets in America (CEPTIA) fought against pay toilets and disbanded after the passage of laws banning them in twelve states. [89] Once again, civic leaders had a difficult time striking the balance between providing a public good and finding the best method by which to do it. 

The need to use the bathroom is universal but access to bathrooms has not always been easy. Racial, class, gender, and social conflicts become more visible in spaces like public bathrooms and illustrates the difficulties cities, states, and well-meaning people have encountered when trying to build and maintain modern toilet facilities for the public. Comfort stations also help us see and understand what cities in the past prioritized. Civic leaders in Salt Lake City in the early twentieth century prioritized the creation of a modern, elegant city with amenities that served the needs of a certain type of well-to-do person. This came at the expense of the city’s working poor who would have benefited most from the creation of sanitary facilities in their neighborhood. Over 100 years later, cities still struggle to solve this problem as access to public restrooms remain elusive for certain people.  

Endnotes

1. “Snap Shots,” Salt Lake Telegram, Dec. 23, 1913, 6.
2. “Comfort Stations to be Opened Soon,” Salt Lake Tribune, Dec. 7, 1913, 19.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Peter C. Baldwin, “Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 2 (2014): 264-288.
6. Ibid., 278.
7. Ibid., 278.
8. Grant Weston Rasumussen, “The Invert Personality” (Master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1937). “Invert” was a common term used to describe gay men. 
9. Peter C. Baldwin, “Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 2 (2014): 264.
10. Elizabeth Ann Duclos-Orsello, Modern Bonds: Redefining Community in Early Twentieth Century St. Paul (Amherst, 2018), 12.
11. Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, 2003); Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York, 1987).
12. Mordecai Lee, Bureaus of Efficiency; Reforming Local Government in the Progressive Era (Milwaukee, 2008).
13.  For instance, Utah is mentioned only in passing and Salt Lake City is not mentioned at all in Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (New York, 2003).
14. Jan Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Urbana, 2000), 21.
15. Juanita Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre (Stanford,1950); Leonard J. Arrington, Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1900, (Cambridge, MA, 1958).  
16. For example, see Jared Farmer, On Zions’ Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Ned Blackhawk Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Max Perry Mueller, Race and the Making of the Mormon People (Chapel Hill, 2017), Martha Sontag Bradley, “Colliding Interests: Mapping Salt Lake City’s West Side,” Journal of Urban History, 31, no. 1 (Nov. 2004): 47-74; John S. McCormick and John R Sillito, History of Utah Radicalism: Startling, Socialistic, and Decidedly Revolutionary (Logan, 2011). 
17. Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age: 1865-1905, (Oxford, 2006), 7.
18. Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America, (Chapel Hill, 2002), 96, 153.
19. Utah State Constitution. art. IV, § 1.
20. Carol Cornwall Madsen, An Advocate for Women: The Public Life of Emmeline B. Wells, 1870-1920, (Provo, 2005); Mari Grana, Pioneer, Polygamist, Politician: The Life of Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon (Guilford, 2009).
21. Lee Davidson, “House marks Utah’s role in repealing Prohibition,” Deseret News, Sept. 18, 2008, https://www.deseret.com/2008/9/18/20275418/house-marks-utah-s-role-in-repealing-prohibition (accessed July 15, 2019). 
22. “Former S.L Officer ‘Enjoys a Good Fight,’” Deseret News, Feb. 10, 1997, (accessed May 15, 2021, https://www.deseret.com/1997/2/10/19294420/former-s-l-officer-enjoys-a-good-fight).     
23. Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons & Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder, 1984), 142-146.
24. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA,1998), 33.
25. “Mayor/Council Plan Wins Big in Election,” Daily Utah Chronicle, May 16, 1979, 1; Mayor J.S. Bransford, “More Beautiful, Greater and Enduring Salt Lake City,” Deseret Evening News, Dec. 17, 1910, 49. “Anti-Mormon State Ticket: American Party Charges that Polygamy is Still Practiced,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1908; The American Party disbanded in 1911.
26. The Mayor’s Committee on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations, Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations (New York, 1897), 144.
27. “More Beautiful, Greater and Enduring Salt Lake City,” Deseret Evening News, Dec. 17, 1910, Part Four, 49.
28. Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons & Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder, 1984), 129; Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930, 3rd ed., (Salt Lake City, 2012); Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Chicago, 1994). 
29. Robert M. Fogelson, Downtown: It’s Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven, 2001), 26-27.
30. Eileen Hallet Stone, “Living History: The Elegant Boston and Newhouse Buildings were Utah’s First Skyscrapers,” The Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 11, 2012, http://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?id=54668203&itype=cmsid (accessed May 10, 2021). 
31. Wilson Martin, Susan Holt, Rob Pett, Max J. Smith, “The Governor’s Mansion,” Utah Preservation: Building on the Past, 1 (1997), https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/utahpreservation_volume1 (accessed May 10, 2021); Kearns Building Collection, box 1, Ms. 410, Special Collections and Archives, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah. 
32. Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons & Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City (Boulder, 1984), 129; Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930, 3rd ed., (Salt Lake City, 2012); Armand L. Mauss, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Chicago, 1994).
33. Bim Oliver, “South Temple Street Landmarks: Salt Lake City’s First Historic District, (Charleston, 2017), 34.
34. Joseph Bauman, “The Old Hotel Utah has Long, Storied History in Salt Lake,” The Deseret News Mar. 16, 2009, https://www.deseretnews.com/article/705291147/The-old-Hotel-Utah-has-long-storied-history-in-Salt-Lake.html (accessed May 10, 2021). 
35. Jon M. Kingsdale, “The ‘Poor Man’s Club’”: Social Functions of the Urban Working-Class Saloon,” American Quarterly, 25, no. 4 (Oct.1973), 472-489.
36. Salt Lake City Television (SLCtv), “Salt Lake City History Minutes-The Original Salt Palace,” YouTube video, 01:39, posted Aug. 1, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNclSmZlsFM; Michael De Groote, “10 Utah Buildings We Miss,” Deseret News, Jan. 9, 2011,  https://www.deseret.com/2011/1/10/20166120/10-utah-buildings-we-miss#the-hall-of-relics-located-at-the-corner-of-south-temple-and-main-street-in-1897 (accessed May 10, 2021). The Salt Palace used salt in the construction, which made the exterior glisten in the sun. The original building burned down in 1910. 
37. “Dedication of St. Mark’s Cathedral,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 15, 1874, 4; “Greek Orthodox Church Dedicated,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 30, 1905, 10; “Presbyterians prepare to enter new edifice, will leave old church home permanently next Sunday, handsome new place of worship,” Salt Lake Telegram, Apr. 13, 1905, 3; “From Small Beginning Methodism Has Great Growth in Salt Lake,” Salt Lake Telegram, May 19, 1906, 3; “Dedication St. Mary’s Cathedral Marks Goal of many years’ labor, magnificent temple of worship in Salt Lake is impressively dedicated by sacred rites of the Roman Catholic Church,” Intermountain Catholic Aug. 21, 1909, 3;  “First two of St. Paul’s Church Unit are complete, rectory and parish house opened during this week,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 9, 1918, 36.
38. Ben Carter, “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915.” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 92-93, 111.
39. Richard L. Forstall, Population of States and Counties of the United States: 1790-1990, U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of the Census (Washington DC, 1996), 162-163, https://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/PopulationofStatesandCountiesoftheUnitedStates1790-1990.pdf; Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons & Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City, (Boulder: Pruett Publishing Company, 1984), 135.
40. Jeffrey D. Nichols, Prostitution, Polygamy, and Power: Salt Lake City, 1847-1918 (Urbana, 2002); David L. Buhler, “The Peculiar Case of James Lynch and Robert King,” Utah Historical Quarterly 60, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 103.  
41. Thomas G. Alexander, “Cooperation, Conflict, and Compromise: Women, Men, and the Environment in Salt Lake City, 1890-1930,” BYU Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1995): 7-39.
42. Thomas G. Alexander and James B. Allen, Mormons & Gentiles: A History of Salt Lake City, (Boulder, 1984), 136; Ben Carter, “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915,” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 110.
43. Ben Carter, “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915,” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 93.
44. Ibid., 111.
45. Ben Carter, “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915.” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 103, 110.
46. “West Siders Indignant, Salt Lake Herald, June 3, 1907, 5. I first saw use of this quote in Ben Carter’s “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915.”  
47. Ben Carter, “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915.” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 104.
48. “West Side Citizens Form Organization to Better Condition,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, Aug. 8, 1913, 6.
49. “Salt Lake to Win G.A.R. Encampment,” Salt Lake Tribune, Sept. 2, 1908, 1; “Enthused over Encampment,” The Deseret Evening News, Sept. 11, 1908, 1.
50. Marc Haddock “Salt Lake Hosted Thousands of Civil War Vets in 1909” Deseret News, Aug. 3, 2009. https://www.deseret.com/2009/8/3/20332474/salt-lake-hosted-thousands-of-civil-war-vets-in-1909#flags-adorn-the-u-s-post-office-and-courthouse-on-main-street-on-aug-9-1909 (accessed May 12, 2021); “Housing Problem for Encampment Is Practically Solved,” Salt Lake Telegram, Aug. 2, 1909, 1; “Many Inquiries as to Quarters,” Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 5, 1909, 1; “Further List of Special Trains,” Deseret News, Aug. 6, 1909, 2; “Free Accommodations for Many Veterans,” Salt Lake Telegram, Aug. 7, 1909, 11; “Wise Old Veteran,” Deseret News, Aug. 9, 1909, 1; “Plenty of Rooms and Beds for the Visitors,” Salt Lake Tribune, Aug. 11, 1909, 8l; Ardis E. Parshall, “’This Splendid Outpouring of Welcome’: Salt Lake City and the 1909 National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic,” in Civil War Saints, ed. Kenneth L. Alford (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2012), https://rsc-legacy.byu.edu/archived/civil-war-saints/splendid-outpouring-welcome-salt-lake-city-and-1909-national-encampment (accessed May 12, 2021). 
51. “Public Comfort Stations,” Salt Lake Telegram, Aug. 7, 1909, 11-12.
52. “Public Comfort Stations to be Installed Here,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 30, 1909, 14; “Public Comfort Stations,” Salt Lake Telegram Aug. 7, 1909, 11-12.
53. “Accommodations for 64,000 Arranged,” Salt Lake Telegram, Aug. 7, 1909, 7; Marc Haddock “Salt Lake Hosted Thousands of Civil War Vets in 1909” Deseret News, Aug. 3, 2009. https://www.deseret.com/2009/8/3/20332474/salt-lake-hosted-thousands-of-civil-war-vets-in-1909#flags-adorn-the-u-s-post-office-and-courthouse-on-main-street-on-aug-9-1909 (accessed May 12, 2021); Ardis E. Parshall, “’This Splendid Outpouring of Welcome’: Salt Lake City and the 1909 National Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic,” in Civil War Saints, ed. Kenneth L. Alford (Salt Lake City, 2012), note 28, https://rsc-legacy.byu.edu/archived/civil-war-saints/splendid-outpouring-welcome-salt-lake-city-and-1909-national-encampment (accessed May 12, 2021). 
54. “Salt Lake is in Grip of an Epidemic of Typhoid Fever,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican Sept. 21, 1909, 1.
55. “Salt Lake’s Good Health,” Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 27, 1895, 5; “Typhoid Still on the Increase,” Salt Lake Herald Aug. 29, 1903, 5.
56. As historian Ben Carter has demonstrated, only the wealthy people of the city, most living to the east and south of State Street, benefitted from the municipal improvements. Ben Carter, “Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915.” Utah Historical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 110-111.
57. Mayor J.S. Bransford, “More Beautiful, Greater and Enduring Salt Lake City,” Deseret Evening News, Dec. 17, 1910, 49.
58. Ibid.
59. Peter C. Baldwin, “Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 2 (2014): 264-288.
60. Ibid., 271.
61. Ibid., 276.
62. The Mayor’s Committee on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations, Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations (New York: New York, 1897), 147.
63. The Mayor’s Committee on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations, Report on Public Baths and Public Comfort Stations (New York: New York, 1897), 12.
64. Ibid., 144.
65. Ibid., 143.
66. Ibid., 142-148.
67. “Corrected Plat Not Yet Filed,” Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 21, 1910, 12; “Salt Lake City to Have Six Public Comfort Stations,” Domestic Engineering, vol. L, no. 6 (Feb. 5, 1910): 140.
68. Sources are unclear, but councilman L.D. Martin appears to have championed building permanent comfort stations several years earlier. See, “Salt Lake City to Have Six Public Comfort Stations,” Feb. 5, 1910, Domestic Engineering, vol. L, no 6 (1910): 140.
69. “First Comfort Station is Being Constructed, Salt Lake Herald, Aug. 10, 1913.
70. “Bank Objects to Comfort Station,” Salt Lake Telegram, Sept. 29, 1922, page 25.
71. “Sunday Rite to Open Park Office,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 18, 1962, 34; “Comfort Station for Murray City Assured,” Murray Eagle, Apr. 9, 1931, 1; “City Plans Action on Two Projects,” Daily Herald, Jan. 9, 1934, 1; “Legal Notices,” Ogden Standard, Apr. 12, 1919, 14.  
72. I have photographs from the Utah State Archives of restrooms in ZCMI but I am unable to locate any photographic evidence for restrooms in the Auerbachs department store, but as a competitor with ZCMI we can probably assume the store had restrooms for shoppers to use.  
73. Peter C. Baldwin, “Public Privacy: Restrooms in American Cities, 1869-1932,” Journal of Social History 48, no. 2 (2014): 270, 266.
74. “$10,000 for Another Public Comfort Station,” Salt Lake Telegram, Feb. 5, 1914, 12.
75. “Will Erect Two New Comfort Stations,” Salt Lake Tribune, Mar. 24, 1914, 16.
76. “Comfort Stations Model of Neatness,” Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 14, 1913, 16. 
77. Marcia Greenlee, “Interview with Arline Yarbrough August 3, 1977,” in The Black Women Oral History Project, ed. Ruth Edmonds Hill (Westport: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), 420-421.
78. “Death Claims old Negro Resident,” Salt Lake Telegram, Mar. 20, 1922, 2. This article announces the death of 90-year-old Andrew Campbell, “one of the first negroes to come to Salt Lake,” in his home on Fifth East and 400 South Streets, several miles east of the Westside.
79. Marcia Greenlee, “Interview with Arline Yarbrough August 3, 1977,” in The Black Women Oral History Project, ed. Ruth Edmonds Hill (Westport, 1991), 420.
80. Ibid., 421.
81. Ibid., 420.
82. “Comfort Stations Models of Neatness,” Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 14, 1913, 16.
83. “City Plans Repairs of Restrooms,” Salt Lake Telegram, Mar. 22, 1945, 10.
84. Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People who made it (Chicago, 2004), 168.
85. “Save $3,000 Yearly,” Salt Lake Tribune, Jan. 22, 1962, 8.
86. Patricia Cooper and Ruth Oldenziel, “Cherished Classifications: Bathrooms and the Construction of Gender/Race on the Pennsylvania Railroad during World War II,” Feminist Studies 25, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 7-41; Eileen Boris, “’You Wouldn’t Want One of Them Dancing with Your Wife’: Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II,” American Quarterly 50, no. 1, (March 1998): 77-108. 
87. Natalie Shure, “The Politics of Going to the Bathroom,” The Nation, May 23, 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/toilet-urination-disability-access/ (accessed May 26, 2021).
88. “The Struggle for Equal Access to Public Restrooms,” Facility: A Magazine about Bathrooms, 1, (Summer 2019): 17-21, here 19.
89. “Pay Toilets,” New York Times, June 20, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/06/20/archives/notes-highway-sculpture-notes-about-travel-notes-about-travel.html (accessed May 25, 2021); “Group Seeks to End Pay Toilets,” Sarasota Journal, July 25, 1973, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=CPceAAAAIBAJ&sjid=KY0EAAAAIBAJ&pg=7338,2470934 (accessed May 25, 2021); “Comfort-for-Fay Being Flushed Out,” The Evening Independent, Aug. 2, 1973, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=if0LAAAAIBAJ&sjid=sVcDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1851,609678 (accessed May 25, 2021).