Acity is defined by the way its residents use or abuse it. Manila is truly a distinctive city in that many are of the belief that it is one big open sewer. That’s why Manileños see it fit to use its streets and fences as public urinals. In this olfactory sense, our streets complement the city’s esteros and the Pasig River by way of their signature stench reeking from human and industrial excreta. Only the stink from foul deals and moral decay oozing from government offices manages to compete with pervasive eau de Manille.
Of course, Manila is not the first city to face this problem. Paris, the City of Lights, was overwhelmed by this problem early in the 1830s. Its population had ballooned to one million at the cusp between the Second Republic and the Second Empire. The city’s grand boulevards were teeming with people every day (mostly men) and since early 19th century edifices did not have public toilets, Parisians had to relieve themselves where they could.
It was the Prefect of the Seine Claude Philibert Barthelot, comte de Rambuteau, who, in the 1930s, started installing public toilets at strategic spots in the city. The Prefect was the de facto mayor of Paris, a central government appointee, since the city had too much importance nationally to be made independent. (Manila was thought of in the same way, as its mayors were all appointed until after the Second World War.)
Rambuteau called these contraptions of sheet iron on tubular columns vespasiennes. It was said that he chose this name from Roman history (Paris was previously Lutetia, a Roman settlement early in its history). Vespasian was a Roman emperor who was the first to install urinals in a city. He reportedly placed large amphoras (narrow necked clay jars normally used for wine) at street sides and charged a tax for anyone using them.
“The first vespasiennes were one-person affairs, resembling sentry boxes. The people of Paris dubbed them Rambuteaus (after the prefect) — a name they also gave to every hole that the street-improvement-mad prefect had dug in the road. Perhaps this is a comment on Parisians’ sanitary habits at the time, which caused visitors to wince. Vespasiennes developed in time into two-man and ultimately multi-person amenities, each with a light over them, producing a kind of masculine sociability about which their defenders later waxed nostalgic. The poet Barthélemy apostrophized boulevard columns (which) prevent the shy /from needing modestly to avert the eye. (It sounded better in French.) Historian Richard Cobb spoke fondly, too, of Athena welcoming artistically perforated chapels of fraternity.”
Colin tells us that the pissoir became a defining element of the Parisian urban landscape in the massive reconstruction of Paris undertaken by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann (Rambuteau’s successor) in the 1850s onwards. “Haussmann and his trusty associate Alphand sought to equip all the new boulevards, roadways, and public parks of the city with an impressive ensemble of street furniture including street lamps, benches, iron railings, street signs, post-boxes, newspaper kiosks, tree-supports, tree-root protectors, publicity columns (the so-called Morris columns), and water fountains (particularly the Wallace fountains installed at the expense of the English philanthropist Sir Richard Wallace from the 1870s).” This is contemporary to our Carriedo water system, also the product of philanthropy.
Colin continues, “lf in some respects at least, as Walter Benjamm noted, the boulevard resembled the bourgeois home, it was not surprising that the bourgeois’s critics should resort to vandalism. The Communards of 1871, for example, used Haussmannian street furniture — notably tree-root protectors — as functional trophies in the building of barricades. Another critic of bourgeois culture, the artist marvel Duchamp, in his Dada and Surrealist phase provided another kind of critique: his famous, scandal-producing art installation contained, exhibited in New York, was a public urinal.”
Colin notes the immediate attraction of the vespasienne as objects of artistic attention: “From the earliest days the vespasienne had attracted photographers. These curious connections, whose architectural styles ran the range from gothic through classical to the baroque (with occasional pagoda-like accessories), eventually took their place as privileged parts of le Vieux Paris. Yet photographers and Impressionist painters seem to have regarded them less as atavistic throwbacks than as icons of Parisian modernity.
Symptomatically, from Rambuteau’s time onwards they were used for attaching advertising and, from the later umpteenth century, color posters. These posters could be for almost any modern commodity, though by the 1930s American resident Henry Miller (an enthusiastic devotee of the vespasienne, was complaining that they had become the site for public health announcements concerning venereal disease, featuring the various stages of syphilis or gonorrhea (from the germ plasm up to the death skull-a leering, gunning figure of death and disease with empty sockets).”
The vespasiennes slowly dwindled in number over the next 40 years due to the improvements in building amenities. From a high of 4,000 around Paris in 1914, the number fell to approximately a thousand by the 1940s and less than 500 a decade later. They were all but lost in the 1970s although one appears to still exist (as a tourist attraction). In the ’50s, too, the city government focused on providing improved toilet facilities for both sexes called chalets de necessite. From the ’70s onwards, Paris mayors starting with Jacques Chirac replaced these with sanisettes. Today, the most modern of them are paid per use and completely sanitized by sprays of detergent and water in between users. The French have even exported these to cities like San Francisco, Washington DC, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, and soon, Singapore.
I also discovered several in the grounds of the now defunct Rizal Provincial Capitol that would have been built in the 1980s predating the now famous MMDA stands.
There are reportedly over 500 of the pink contraptions along our major streets (at least those the MMDA has jurisdiction over). As in older Paris, the presence of these amenities reflects the deficiencies in the larger urban design of the city and the lack of conveniences in the public and semi-public realm.
Our architecture and urban design are exclusionary. Few building owners refuse to let the general pubic relieve themselves in ground floor toilets; sometimes eliminating them entirely. Modern Manilans have to patronize any number of fast foods to be able to buy some relief. There was a move to build and maintain public toilets led by the Department of Tourism, but this program seems to have lost steam — judging by the sad state of highway and airport toilets away from Manila.
In many parts of Manila and in countless other Philippine cities and towns, the sight of grown men relieving themselves against a wall is an ordinary but still disgusting sight. The practice reflects the fact that most Filipinos (at least the males) have little respect for their neighborhoods, towns or cities. The absence of toilets (as well as lack of any other public convenience) for children and women in most of our cities and towns makes clear a gender bias that was last acceptable in the 19th century.
Finally, the availability of clean free public toilets only in malls and private developments highlights a class bias that throws us back further as a society. Of course this is now taken one step further with the charging of upwards of P20 to take a piss in “VIP” toilets in the more hoity-toity establishments.
When will we ever find total politically correct, free-of-charge, fragrant and private relief?
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.