When you gotta go, you gotta go

People need to go to the washroom. There's no getting around it. The question is where. In Toronto the city council spent a lot of time talking about exactly that problem. In 1873 The Board of Health had this to say:

“The necessity of the establishment of a number of urinals on the public streets, has received the attention of your Board, and it is recommended that they be empowered to place such necessaries at fixed localities, throughout the City, as may be deemed advisable.”
W.H. Chairman, Feb. 15, 1873, Report No. 2.
(City Council Appendix 1873, 22)

Certainly the police were keen to have them. Chief Constable Frank C. Draper had this to way in his annual report to council in 1876:

“I venture to suggest the propriety of applying to the Board of Works for the erection at different points, of public urinals, conveniences now greatly needed.”
(Chief Constable Annual Report for 1875, March 10, 1876, City Council Appendix 1876, 92)

And in 1881, Draper was back on the same subject:

“Public Urinals—Are much needed in our City, and His Worship the Police Magistrate has more than once refused to inflict a fine for indecent exposure, owing to the absence of these necessities.”
(Chief Constable Annual Report for 1880, Jan. 24, 1881, City Council Appendix 1881, 26)

By 1887, after dickering around with the issue for years and even fielding offers from private citizens willing to build the urinals, provided they would be allowed to advertise in them (City Council Minutes, 160), the city finally had some urinals up and running. The city gave the final order to contruct them on July 4, 1887 (City Council Minutes, July 4, 1887, 770).  Oddly, the urinals didn’t solve the problem of indecency. While before the city and the police had fretted about men exposing themselves on the street when they wanted to go to urinate. Now the concern was focused on what men were doing when they went into the urinals. As the Committee on Markets and Health noted in a report to the city just weeks after the new urinals had been constructed:

“Your committee would recommend that the Board of Police Commissioners be represented to issue instructions to the members of the police force to inspect the various urinals now erected in different parts of the city two or three times daily, so as to prevent nuisances being created therein, and also to prevent using them for any other purpose than that for which they are intended.”
(Report no. 17 of the committee on markets and health, F. Johnson, chairman
Aug. 26, 1887, City Council Appendix 1887)

They don’t specify what the uses the urinals were being put to and I’m not sure that’s critical. To me the interesting point is how the construction of urinals pushes the city to engage even more with how people went to the washroom; to become even more engaged with policing bodies. Draper might have hoped urinals would take urination out of the public and police eye. But it appears to have had quite the opposite impact.

For more on toilets and Toronto see:
Steven Maynard. Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures, Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 1890-1930. Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Oct., 1994), pp. 207-242