The “clicks” you hear around town are the sounds of “public” toilet locks snapping shut. The Great Loo Lockdown is gathering steam as businesses protect their bathrooms, and their customers, from the insane, incontinent souls who move in and leave them unusable and disgusting for everyone else.
Starbucks is the latest chain to announce that its locations nationwide are henceforth off-limits to loiterers, drug users, panhandlers, and bathroom vandals.
Restricting toilets that were previously truly “public” is typically done in the name of providing better service to paying customers.
In truth, it has one purpose: to keep the riffraff out. New York City always had street lunatics, but the current breed is much more violence-prone and inclined to seize public toilets for drug-taking and all manner of antisocial antics.
The new rule affects about 170 Starbucks outlets in the Big Apple, of a total of more than 15,000 in the US.
The java-flingers clearly had enough of the coast-to-coast damage caused by its open-to-all policy in cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle that suffered repeated robberies and murders.
“No purchase needed” for toilet use was the brainchild of Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who once had the even dumber idea (quickly dropped) that baristas should engage customers in conversations about race relations.
I complained in a story seven years ago that Starbucks’ decision to open the toilets to everyone, customer or not, was ignored at many Manhattan locations.
I griped that many locations found ways to keep the supposedly public bathrooms off-limits. Managers claimed they had broken plumbing or blocked doors for “construction.”
But in 2025, I can only ask: what took them so long to come to their senses and reserve the loos, seats, and waiting areas for paying customers only?
The lock-it-up spirit also pops up at increasing numbers of Big Apple hotels, stores, and restaurants.
The bathrooms that were until recently open to all at The Pierre, Omni Berkshire, and the Sheraton New York now are barred to outsiders; hotel guests must use a code or room-card swipe to enter.
The Canal Street Food Hall now requires toilet users to punch in the code shown on their receipts. The same’s true at Barnes & Noble stores — which were my frequent go-to’s when nature called — and at myriad fast-casual cafes.
Anyone who spends time on the street and hears nature’s call can attest to making similar grim discoveries.
As any desperate person who’s tried to access an unlocked public toilet knows, the precious few available are monopolized by vagrants who lock themselves in for much longer than biology requires.
The MTA has kept bathrooms open to everyone at 122 stations. The fearless soul that I am, I occasionally use them but more than once fled from the ones at Fulton Center, Broadway Junction in Brooklyn, and Stillwell Avenue in Coney Island the moment I walked in; the raving madmen in the stalls were too much for my ears.
As long as our elected officials and dimwitted homelessness “advocates” refuse to remove the menaces off the street involuntarily, we’ll have fewer and fewer places to relieve ourselves as businesses decide the risks of having toilets are too high.
Meanwhile, “experts” falsely blame the scarcity of toilets in parks and on streets on high costs and bureaucratic red tape involved in building them.
New Yorkers have forever grumbled that our city doesn’t have nearly enough public toilets, especially compared with other “global capitals” such as London and Paris.
Our pols of course pay lip service to the scarcity.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, for example, notes that there are a mere 1,100 public toilets for more than eight million residents — or one for every 6,000 New Yorkers, making us 93rd out of 100 US cities on public loos per capita.
But most elected pols shy away from advocating for the only action that would make a real difference — removing the menaces from the street whether they like it or not (although Controller Brad Lander recently softened his resistance to the idea). Only Mayor Eric Adams forcefully calls for involuntary commitment.
Gov. Hochul is now on board with the idea — at least on paper — but who knows whether her notion to amend the state’s Mental Hygiene Law to “address gaps in the standards for involuntary commitment” will go anywhere.
Good luck getting it through the woke-driven state Legislature which is mainly in the business of making life miserable for law-abiding citizens.
So, expect more “public” bathrooms to be off-limits. Learn to hold it in — or hold your nose.
