SFist Raves: Secret Bathroom Spot
So there you are, wandering around one of San Francisco's bountiful neighborhoods when all of a sudden you get that calling from nature. You start to look around for a place to go only to realize that-- horror of horrors--there is no place to go. Because there's never really a good place to go when you have to go. This city is lousy for loos. Which is why we here at SFist have came today to praise secret bathroom spots.
What's the secret bathroom spot? That's the spot in any neighborhood that you know you can use when the time comes. And it's secret because, well, if you told people about them, they'd tell other people, and they'd tell other people, and you can say goodbye to secret bathroom spot.
Image from David Byrne's Web site. Go Figure
The problem is that there are just not enough decent public bathrooms around. Or at least one's that you don't need a hazmat suit to enter. Stores and restaurants usually won't let you use them because they're either "closed" or "they don't have any" which is a total lie because we know the people who work there have to go at some point. Other places enforce the "restrooms for customer only" rule and you wind up having to buy a non-fat decaf soy late just to get those bulky, big bathroom keys. Or they'll let you in, but not without having to go through the embarrassment of letting all the servers and customers know exactly what you came in for. As for our lovely parks, most of the bathrooms there make us nostalgic for the hole-in-a-ground bathrooms we used while backpacking through Thailand. And those J.C. DeCaux toilets with the kick ass space age self-cleaning toilet? We have no problems plunking down a few quarters in certain neighborhoods, but we'd rather risk going into an Ebola ridden African village than the one on 16th & Mission.
Which is why it's so important to have the secret bathroom spot. Like it's pretty well known that the big downtown five star hotels all have the nicest, most easily accessible bathrooms. The Marriott, for instance, has much better bathrooms than the those at the nearby Metreon. In SOMA, we know that some of those business centers with less than strident security always has bathrooms around you could use (we love the ones' at the Rincon Center). We could list more, but we don't want to give away some of our spots. Rest assured, though, that if you've lived in this city long enough, you know which restaurants will let you use theirs, which bars won't hassle you (think the bigger ones), which fast food joints don't have to buzz you in, and which public bathrooms are worth the health risk.
All we can say is thank G-d for our secret bathroom spots.