A door jammed on one of those antique-style public restrooms with the automatic doors on Market Street, trapping a man inside sometime Tuesday morning.
San Francisco firefighters were called to the scene when a city street cleaner reported a man trapped in a public restroom at Market and Spear streets just before 8 am today.
As the Chronicle reports, the SFFD brought in the hydraulic Jaws of Life tool to pry open the door of the restroom, and the man was then freed.
Longtime San Francisco residents may remember that these dark-green-painted, Parisian-style, "self-cleaning" public toilets arrived as part of a contract with French company JCDecaux back in 1995. As SF Weekly recounted in this 2014 piece, the company paid for the cost of 25 of these models, and their installation, at around $250,000 apiece, benefiting from their use as advertising kiosks over the next three decades.
JCDecaux has its own maintenance team that roams the city addressing issues with the kiosks, however they have been frequently derided over the years as "20-minute hotel rooms" for sex work and drug use which are often very filthy inside.
And as Mission Local reported in 2019, when the contract with JCDecaux was up for renewal, the city has been stuck in a fairly bad deal since 1995, with other contracts for street advertising — with Clear Channel for instance, on Muni bus stops — the city takes in 55 percent of the ad revenue generated.
JCDecaux unveiled a new, "futuristic," silver-clad toilet model at Embarcadero Plaza in 2022, but it broke down within three days — and we don't have data on how often it's been out of service since.
Related: The Best Public Restrooms In SF
Top image: Photo via Google Street View
