Favorite (or least favorite) Spots for Public Urination?

You can blame the City Mayor for all the defecation and whizzin going on downtown. He has collected all of the Andy Gumps that were used for the homeless, and has intentionally left no privacy for these down and outers to have even the decency of what is left of their humanity. This was in the LA Weekly.

What the hell type of Mayor do we have here? We live in in a metropolis, and we don't have public bathrooms even for the business areas and millions of tourists.

Lets get rid of people like the mayor who pretend to care about our Los Angeles Homeless problem, and turn our eyes to people who have the ability to affect a change.

Just check out the Los Angeles Catholic Worker website.

http://lacatholicworker.org/page/2/

How would the mayor like it if his toilet was pulled from underneath him. This mayor needs to go! Any man we voted in who doesn't care about humanity, but instead cares about the dollar, needs to be let go!

Let's impeach him and get rid of him...

How could he leave human beings stranded with out a toilet?

You know I am sick and tired of all of this talk about the gumps. These porta potties we called in skid row were called Alices after alice callaghan who wanted them. They turned into places of prostitution and many of us down and outers would never ever urinate inside the thing for fear of getting disease or we were afraid to use them because the dope man who supplied the prostitute inside them or those who would buy and then use them wouldn't let us get near, so we urinated on the outside of it or behind it. Or found somewhere better.

I live downtown and I walk all over downtown and it isn't just the down and outers who are urinating all over the place , it is also the people in the suits , I have seen them in the alley or by the alley btetween spring street and Broadway on 5th street. There was also a huge stench around the porta potties because of the urinating that was going on on the outside of it.

I prefer this , then having to live with the dope man in control of the porta potties and the people coming from all over Los Angeles to buy yeir dope or get their quickie.

I am not afraid to speak up!!!

Yeah I have a roof over my head with my bathroom now in the heart of skid row , but you know what , I never used these porta potties when I was out there.

Someone told me that these porta potties were supposed to be monoitored after Alice got them , but they never were.

Seems like the building under renovation on the corner of 6th and spring gets a large amount of defication and urination applied to it. Also before the security lofts on 5th and spring had the scaffolding removed, that area also smelled quite pungent.

The Valuti building at Sixth and Spring. The alley behind that building. The Rowan Building at Fifth and Spring.

I don't live downtown, so I don't know how this compares to the "worst" spots for human waste, but in my visits downtown I always notice that the stair way and park adjacent to Angels Flight that leads to California Plaza always reeks of piss and often has some steaming piles on it.

Is there any obvious solution to this problem? I do find it quite absurd the lack of public toilets in Los Angeles, epecially around those Red Line stations (which reminds me, one of the elevators at the 7th and Metro station is very obviously a public toilet). At the North Hollywood station there is actually a public self-cleaning toilet for 25cents. I'd really like to see more of that. I actually made use of it and it was a suprisingly clean, odor-free, and pleasant experience.

The real issue here is the unwillingness of the local authorities to enforce the rule of law. Skid Row is a lawless zone because the authorities have designed it to be that way. Apparently, this is the height of 'compassion and empathy'.

Until the policies which created Skid Row in its present disasterous state are overturned and some humane policies to really address the various pathologies festering there, we'll continue to have these discussions about marginal issues. Essentially, this is a discussion about re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic long after the ship has capsized and sunk.

Does anyone really think these APT's will do anything to correct the problem of public urination? I think Don points out the folly of this belief. Even if they are successfully rolled out as planned, I'm confident in a few years everyone will be scratching their heads as to why the problem of public urination persists and why this expensive solution only engendered more criminal and anti-social behavior.

Isn't the root of the problem the City Council members are blunt about which parts of their districts are ket to their re-election and catered to versus parts that are neglected. When downtown has electoral clout things will change.

The whole street furniture situation is a fiasco I have been monitoring for years.

BTW, there is a bathroom at one Red Line station--Union Station.

One more comment I'd make is the perception the 'homeless' are the ones urinating in public. The truth of the matter is the offenders pretty much run the gamut of the socio-economic classes. I've seen men in three-piece business suits relieving themselves in broad daylight right on the street.

The reason it happens is because it is tolerated, not a lack of public bathrooms. People know they can get away with it. So they do it. The LAPD issues jaywalking tickets and it certainly has some deterrent effect. I wonder why they don't issue tickets for public urination. My hunch is they wouldn't think twice about issuing such a ticket in Brentwood. And that really cuts to the heart of the matter.

How come LAPD cops aren't as priggish about guys peeing in public as they are about people jaywalking? At least jaywalkers, if they look both ways when crossing streets and are careful enough, won't necessarily be a public nusiance. However, a person leaving urine on a sidewalk always makes it look and smell nasty. And I won't even mention the idea of people (i.e., males) violating public indecency laws when they whip "it" out in the open.

David, I would agree that tolerance is a part of the problem... but as they say, "when you gotta go, you gotta go". I mean the LAPD could ticket, arrest, and/or beat everu public urinator/deficator, but until they have an actual restroom to go to in order the relieve themselves, the problem will continue because even the strongest pavlovian conditioning isn't going to stop the need to pee. the reason we don't see the problem in say brentwood is because brentwood isn't really a neighborhood with an active street level population, people pee in their houses.

The APTS still have dope dealers hanging around them and of course people go inside to shoot up , but there are lines when people are actually using the APT.

The Great thing about the APT is that they are constantly maintained by the company that maintains them.

I don't see a problem in the City Center with what happened with the Plastic porta potties here in skid row . I know NOrth Hollyowood is happy to have theirs. And I was disheartened to watch a abc broadcast news last year when North Hollywood , after many communities in Los Angeles said they didn't want them and downtown is supposedly goig to get the ones other council districts didn't want , now NOrth Hollywood wanted them , because they said it brought more business.

So We may not be getting what we thought we were. It is an expensive proposition to put these things together and get them running. But I feel , in the long run they wouldbe very useful.

We have two p[arks in Skid row with porta potties that are monitored by PArk MAintenance provided by SRO HOusing Corporation. So people , there are places to go , but what people are looking for here are places to shoot up , smoke dope, and HAve sex. So People here will always complain about wanting the Alices back.

The entrance to my parking garage is a favorite urination spot for those waiting for the bus on Spring Street (between 5th and 6th). There's also 5th Street, between Spring and Main, right by the construction scaffolding on the Rowan Lofts. Or on 6th right outside Cole's, right by the bus stop.

The northwest corner of 4th and Main.

One thing maybe worth a mention is that quite a lot of the urine smell around this area comes from dogs. I can only speak for, let's say, Main between 4th and 2nd...and then give or take a couple of blocks E-W. Lots of people walk their dogs, which is certainly normal and legal...but the sheer number of dogs peeing on or around the sidewalk areas also makes the stench pretty bad.

Best,

jaa

There's lots of piss Downtown. Poo is a rarer find though.

But for what it's worth, even "successful" upscale Santa Monica has this problem. It's the large presence of street people (I don't say "homeless" because I don't judge as to the reason they loiter on the street). The parking structures surrounding the 3rd Street Promenade are often unbearable. Esp. the stairways, where apparently folks pee from high up, for the trickle-down effect.

Pershing Square pee city

PS is always closed so you can pee there any time in many spaces. If you pay enough money the money they will open the park for those who can afford to keep the homeless out. piss onit.

I'm puzzled by the gender neutral references to public urination ["people" urinating].

Now, I'm not from Los Angeles.

I'm a New Yorker, and, in the pre Giuliani/Bloomberg police state era, we had a huge problem with MEN urinating in the street.

Not "PEOPLE" peeing in the street.

"MEN" peeing in the streets.

"MEN" peed in the subway stations too - like your Red Line, our subway does not have any public bathrooms either - and, on some lines, that might mean getting off a train after a 2 hour ride with nowhere to pee.

Again, it was "MEN" peeing in public here.

Full disclosure - on more than one occasion, I was one of those men.

Now, the absence of public bathrooms in our city (and the "Restrooms For Customers Only" signs on the stores, bars and restaurants that had bathrooms) affected the bladders of both men and women.

Men dealt with the lack of bathrooms by peeing in the street.

Women dealt with the lack of bathrooms by suffering, straining their bladders and waiting til they got home to pee.

Giuliana launched a crackdown on MEN peeing in the streets (of course, women were exempt - not by design or by law, simply because, unlike men, they waited til they got home, no matter how urgent their need to urinate).

When men started getting fines, arrests and even brief stints in Rikers Island (our city's penal colony - no pun intended - on an island in the East River) then men started acting like the women - either waiting til they got home, or going into a store and buying something so they could use the facilities.

Now, it's rare to see MEN peeing in the streets - and, as before, you almost NEVER see WOMEN peeing in the streets.

So, unless LA is way different than NYC, I'd bet you have a problem with MEN peeing in the streets (and LA women, like their New York sisters, hold in their bladders til they get home, no matter how desperately full they may be).