This past week, Q-line asked: “Are staffed bathrooms in city parking garages the answer to providing relief for downtown denizens? Will you take advantage of the revamped restrooms?” Here are your responses: ✆ “I am a 40-year resident of Santa Monica and haven’t been west of Fifth Street in a long time. I haven’t got the stomach for it — too dirty, too loud, too many people, especially the bums. But I do think the city has finally taken a step in the right direction, providing new and refurbished bathrooms with attendants. I hope they are armed — for their own sake and the public’s. It will be a welcome relief from the opium dens, brothels and flophouses of the past. Well, one out of 1,000 problems we have in this city has been conquered, or hopefully, it will be. We’ll wait and see how it all turns out.” ✆ “If one thing in this town could describe how far we have, as a community, deteriorated, it’s the new downtown toilet idea. What’s needed for the new downtown bathroom is a French idea — unisex stalls. You would need only one attendant. How about saving the environment by not using toilet paper, and instead having a bidet? Low-income housing equals a tremendous amount of bathroom graffiti, or in other words, insensitive minority oppressed artwork. These modern-day Da Vincis are likely to spraypaint the attendant. You need more police presence.” ✆ “By the most part, public toilets are used for emergency purposes. Public toilets are not a place where a normal person would visit just to sit and rest. Having attendants wearing gas masks protecting those who venture into these two poop-holes will simply move the sexual perverts who frequent these two areas into the reservoir of other poop-holes in the city, especially along the ocean-front. Still, it is a good idea to have a couple of safer rooms, excuse me, safer restroom havens where any person can let it hang out without being propositioned.” ✆ “Yes, as a longtime resident of this lovely city of Santa Monica, I think it’s a very good idea if those garages are going to be staffed with personnel, because sometimes it does get creepy and we don’t want to be creepy. We’re a lovely city by the beautiful bay of Santa Monica.” ✆ “Having a bathroom attendant could be a good idea, although the problem is most of the bums just go the bathroom wherever they happen to be — in the alley or in the park. They don’t even know what a bathroom is. And the ones that do vandalize bathrooms, whether they’re gang members or bums. They might be tempted to assault the attendants. So, hopefully, the attendant is armed and can deal with it, they know karate or something like that.” ✆ “Who in their right mind would want to use a parking-structure bathroom in the city of Santa Monica? It’ll stink, all the bums will be there, the police stated two months ago that a woman almost got raped in parking structure four; cars have been broken into and things stolen. Anybody in their right mind would go to one of the fancy restaurants and use the bathroom, or to the beach restrooms where they can be out in public.” ✆ “I think it’s a good idea to have restroom attendants. And why not also have them doling out perfumes and colognes just to make for possibly more interesting nights for many of the bathroom users? I mean, you might as well. Maybe even have a girlie dancing place on top of the restrooms.” ✆ “I think this is a must: There should be boxes where people could put money before the door opens. It could start from a quarter to a dollar. Then people would have to pay to get in to use it, and they’ll have a better way of keeping it clean and not being abused by the transients and the gangs and people who don’t appreciate nice things, to make our community in Santa Monica livable.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 8, 2006. Read the original PDF.