One of my ongoing academic obsessions, since they were the subject of my very first publication, is the history of public urinals. I even got to help out with a memorial plaque that’s going up in Paris at one of the last remaining pissotières in the city (not sure if it’s up yet). I can’t help but notice them, especially historic ones like the one on Johns Hopkins’s campus in Baltimore pictured above, when wandering around a city. But also when they pop up elsewhere. Right now I’m reading Patricia Highsmiths’s The Talented Mr. Ripley for the first time and when Tom first goes to Paris he describes what he first notices:
It was the atmosphere of the city that he loved, the atmosphere that he had always heard about, crooked streets, gray-fronted houses with skylights, noisy car horns, and everywhere public urinals and columns with brightly colored theater notices on them.
The public urinal indelibly marked the city, here as one part of its very modernity. The Talented Mr. Ripley first appeared in 1955; by the 1980s, the classic pissotières were removed in favor of the self-cleaning (and pretty gross) facilities that now dot the Parisian landscape.