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(rshsdepot) Grand Central Terminal, NYC

Bathroom blues at Grand Central
By Donna Porstner
Staff Writer

January 24, 2003

NEW YORK -- Like many early morning commuters, Janet Tarzia needs a caffeine
fix.

Each day, she buys a large Dunkin' Donuts coffee with Sweet 'N Low and extra
milk before catching the 6:46 a.m. train out of the Bridgeport station.

Twenty ounces and 75 minutes later, she has to make a pit stop at a powder
room at Grand Central Terminal in New York City.

In the mornings, the main bathroom isn't too crowded, so her bladder gets a
break.

But during evening rush hour, lines are so long that the 42-year-old
marketing executive has had to devise a beverage-management plan to keep her
from missing her train.

"I don't drink anything an hour before I leave my office," said Tarzia, a
Monroe resident. "My bathroom breaks are very planned."

There have been so many complaints about long waits to use the terminal's
public rest rooms -- particularly from women -- that Metro-North Railroad is
building more.

A few feet from the main bathrooms on the dining concourse level,
Metro-North, a subsidiary of New York City-based Metropolitan Transportation
Authority, is spending about $1.4 million to convert 1,539 square feet of
retail space into luxurious lavatories with polished Italian marble tile on
the walls and Georgia marble stalls.

The new facilities -- a men's room and womens' room under the escalators on
the Vanderbilt Avenue side of the station -- are expected to open in about
six months.

"If we make them nice, people will respect them and they won't get abused,"
said Wayne Ehmann, Metro-North chief architect.

Deborah Fisher of Cortlandt, N.Y., said she does not care what the bathrooms
are made of as long as they are clean and in working order. Fisher, 19,
stops in the terminal's main bathroom every day to put on makeup before
heading to her job at an Equinox health club.

"I see people put in new toilet paper, but they don't clean," Fisher said
Tuesday morning while taking a break from applying mascara.

She said there often is toilet paper on the floor and urine on the toilet
seats and the floor is dirty, but she doesn't want to be too critical -- it
is, after all, a public rest room.

"I guess I can't complain because there are so many people using it," Fisher
said.

As many as 700,000 people a day flow through Grand Central, making it the
busiest train station in the country, said Dan Brucker, Metro-North
spokesman.

There are 20 public toilets for women -- 17 in the womens' room on the
dining concourse and three in the stationmaster's office on the main level.
Once the new women's room opens in late spring or early summer, there will
be 32, Brucker said.

"With all of the people who run through here, you'd think they'd have more
bathrooms," said Carmine Izzo of Troy, N.Y., who was waiting for his wife,
Jane, to come out of the main ladies' room Tuesday morning. "You try not to
use the toilets on the train."

Metro-North riders consistently give low marks to bathrooms on the New Haven
Line because of long lines and unsavory appearance.

"Every time we do a satisfaction survey, the toilets fail both in the
stations and in the trains," said Rodney Chabot, chairman of the Connecticut
Metro-North-Shore Line East Rail Commuter Council, "The toilets are always
the worst, but at least they are addressing it."

The bathroom situation is getting so desperate, Chabot said, that he penned
a personal note to Metro-North President Peter Cannito, telling him about a
disappointing experience he had one weekend last month. Chabot, a New Canaan
resident, was taking friends from Boston to see the Christmas tree at
Rockefeller Center and visit other sites when they stopped to use the Grand
Central rest rooms.

"They loved the city. They loved the train ride. The only thing they didn't
like was the desperation of people waiting to use the rest rooms," Chabot
said. "The situation was awful. We had to wait 20 minutes."

The lines were worse than on weekdays, Chabot said, with men and women
"standing in line with their legs crossed." He said the problem is that
tourists, unlike commuters who can use the facilities at their offices, have
nowhere else to go.

Mary Jane Plouffe of Trumbull, who passes through the station every Saturday
when she takes her 15-year-old daughter to acting class, wonders why
Metro-North removed bathrooms on the main level years ago.

The former women's room is now the Super Runners Shop and the former men's
room has been gutted and is used as a staging area for special events.

The restrooms were moved downstairs with the food vendors during a major
renovation in 1998, Ehmann said. Though most Metro-North customers remember
the restrooms being on the main level, Ehmann said they started out on the
lower level when the station opened in 1913.

"The original plan in 1913 had them down a level. They were huge. They had,
like, 30 stalls in the men's room," he said.

But as the station shifted from serving passengers on long-distance trips to
serving commuters, the need for massive bathrooms declined, Ehmann said. The
original men's room is now a conductor's locker room.

The new men's room will have six stalls, he said.

Commuters who have missed trains because they had to wait five or 10 minutes
in line at a rest room say there is no such thing as too many public
bathrooms.

The worst situation, said Debbie Stolting, a 24-year-old Wilton resident who
commutes from the Westport station to Grand Central, is missing a train
after 9 p.m., when they run once an hour. Though most commuters are gone by
that time, Stolting said, there are times when half of the bathroom is
closed for cleaning and there is a wait for open stalls.

The new bathrooms will be staffed by attendants from the station's opening
at 5 a.m. until its closing at 1:30 a.m., Brucker said.

Custodians who clean the rest rooms said the train passengers who complain
about unsatisfactory conditions prevent them from getting cleaned.

Dennis Burke, who cleans the public men's room in the stationmaster's
office, said it is a fight every day to close the bathrooms at 1:30 p.m. to
power wash them.

"We say, 'Ma'am, we have bathrooms on the train,' " but riders are reluctant
to use the on-board facilities, complaining they are too dirty, Burke said.

"We hear all the excuses in the world," he said.

After waiting about 10 minutes in line to use the ladies' room in the
stationmaster's office Tuesday morning, one woman decided she had wasted her
time.

"I'm going to hold it," she said, announcing her dissatisfaction with the
rest room's cleanliness. "We're going to Penn Station. I'll try there."


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railroad structures at: http://www.rrshs.org

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