Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani announced this week that the city has started installing 17 new public bathrooms across all five boroughs, the first physical rollout of a $4 million pilot meant to give New Yorkers a free, clean place to go when they are out and about. They join the roughly 1,000 public restrooms the city already runs, about 70 percent of them in parks, and they are the first of the 30 to 40 modular units Mamdani promised in January.
Four of the units are landing in Brooklyn: Columbus Park, Milestone Park, the corner of Fulton Street and Truxton Street, and Avenue C Plaza. Queens is getting four more, including one at Astoria Boulevard South and 31st Street and another at 34th Avenue and 64th Street. The rest are split across the Bronx, Manhattan and Staten Island, from Yankee Stadium to Cooper Square to the North Shore Esplanade.
Each bathroom is free and open every day from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., according to the Mayor’s Office. The modular, ADA-accessible units are fully touchless and come with a running-water sink, a flushing toilet, climate control and a baby-changing station. Throne Labs, the company the city hired to build and run them, is responsible for cleaning and maintaining each one.
You can get in four ways: text message, QR code, a tap card handed out by local community partners, or the Throne Bathroom Network app. The app also lets you find the nearest unit, check its real-time cleanliness rating and see whether it is occupied before you walk over.
Mamdani made the announcement Wednesday morning at Throne Labs’ warehouse in Queens, and the first question from reporters was whether requiring a phone or a card shuts out the homeless New Yorkers the program is supposed to serve. Mamdani said local institutions, starting with the World’s Borough Bookstore in Queens, will hand out physical TAP cards. Throne Labs co-founder and CEO Fletcher Wilson said each unit will carry signage listing where cards are available “within a ten minute walk.” Asked why an electronic entry system is needed at all if the doors open on their own, Mamdani said the phone and card check-ins are what feed the cleanliness ratings that trigger a faster cleaning.
“Too many New Yorkers know what it’s like to have nowhere to go while they’re on the go,” Mamdani said in the announcement. “This pilot is about making sure New Yorkers can count on a clean, safe, accessible bathroom when they need one. We are going to learn from this pilot and build a public bathroom network that meets the needs of New Yorkers in every borough.”
At the podium, Mamdani put the gap in numbers. “It is estimated that our city has only one public toilet for every 8,500 New Yorkers,” he said. The analysis behind the Council’s bathroom law put the ratio at one per 7,820. He tied the pilot to the “sewer socialism” of the Milwaukee mayors who ran on public works a century ago, an approach he said was “pioneered by a group of Milwaukee mayors at the beginning of the twentieth century,” and delivered the line built for the clip: “Today, we are putting the sewage back in sewer socialism.” Deputy Mayor for Operations Julia Kirsten followed him. “Right now, New York City has roughly 1,000 public bathrooms. Finding one is like searching for a needle in a haystack,” she said.
The Mayor’s Office traces the plan back to a commitment Mamdani made on his 10th day in office and to a January announcement of the $4 million modular pilot. In June, the New York City Economic Development Corporation selected Throne Labs through a competitive bidding process to deliver, operate and service the bathrooms. The pilot runs for one year, with installation beginning this week. It sits on top of the Adams-era Ur In Luck program, which committed more than $150 million for 82 park restrooms through 2029, and the law Nurse wrote requires the city to reach 2,120 public restrooms by 2035.
The units are self-contained, which is the whole point of going modular. They do not need to hook into water, sewer or power lines, so the city can drop them into a plaza, move them or pull them out as a neighborhood’s needs change. Throne Labs already runs bathroom networks in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Atlanta, Seattle, the Bay Area and Detroit.
The price is the other argument for modular. Mamdani said 17 of the units “cost about what one public restroom has historically costed in New York City,” and called that part of the reason the city has built so few. Asked whether 17 toilets on top of roughly 1,000 make a dent, he said “it is an important first step” toward the larger goal.
City officials framed the pilot as a fix for a basic gap in public life. “All New Yorkers deserve welcoming public spaces that allow them to get where they’re going with dignity and feel cared for. Public restrooms improve the quality of life for everyone, especially our older adults, parents with young children, delivery workers, people with disabilities and so many more,” said NYC DOT Commissioner Mike Flynn, whose agency worked with NYCEDC and Parks to site the locations.
NYC Parks Commissioner Tricia Shimamura, who called Parks the city’s largest provider of free restrooms, said the modular approach lets the city build “clean, safe and fully accessible bathrooms more quickly and efficiently.” NYCEDC President and CEO Anthony Shorris said access to a restroom “is a basic matter of dignity,” whether you are making deliveries, working construction, driving a cab or just spending the day in your neighborhood.
The 17 bathrooms are also being pitched as the opening move in a much larger goal. Council Member Sandy Nurse said the pilot puts the city on a path to “doubling the number of public restrooms by 2035 and creating the city’s first comprehensive public bathroom strategy.” Nurse said the lack of public toilets has real consequences: “For decades, our inability to build and manage public restrooms has effectively excluded some people from public space.”
At the press conference Nurse, who sponsored the law behind the 2,100-restroom target, said the bill was “about three and a half years in the making,” built by a coalition that included Vocal New York, AARP, the Coalition for the Homeless, the Street Vendor Project and Legal Aid, on top of the Free2Pee coalition that Picture the Homeless started in 2018. Without public toilets, she said, unhoused New Yorkers are “discriminated against from accessing private facilities and then criminalized with a summons for simply having nowhere else to go.” Her read on the pilot: “This is just one pilot, and it’s an exciting one. But we know to get to 2,100 public restrooms is going to require a lot of creative strategies.” Even that number, she said, “is not enough for a city of 8,000,000 people that’s growing.”
Council Member Shaun Abreu said the new restrooms “will serve the seniors, parents, their children and everyday New Yorkers who have too often been left searching in vain for a place to go,” and said he hopes the program grows. Council Member Rita Joseph called the investment “a great first step,” pointing to mothers with young children who get stranded when there is nowhere to go.
Reporters also asked how the city will keep the units from turning into spots for drug use. Mamdani said every unit is cleaned by a real person “on average every 15 uses or fewer,” and that the toilets are built to move people along: the average public restroom visit runs “somewhere below four minutes, about three point five minutes or so,” he said. Throne Labs said users get audio and visual warnings at five and eight minutes and the door opens at ten. Jessica Heinzelman, Throne Labs co-founder and chief operating officer, said the opening door has “actually saved lives in other locations where someone is having a medical emergency.” Someone who smokes inside gets a warning tied to their phone, she said, and across more than 2,000,000 uses “only 0.2 of people are repeatedly misusing the restrooms and getting restricted,” with a path to get access back.
For Throne Labs Co-founder and CEO Fletcher Wilson, the launch is personal. “My gut has always caused me issues, and I try not to leave my house without knowing exactly where the nearest restroom is going to be,” Wilson said. “That constant worry follows me everywhere. We started Throne to solve exactly this problem.” You can watch the full announcement, in which Mamdani predicts the units will “soon become New York City’s number one place to go number two,” on the Mayor’s Office YouTube channel.
Featured image: NYC Mayor's Office
