Vespasienne

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This is a surviving vespasienne /vɛspazjɛn/, or street urinal, on the boulevard Arago, right next to the Santé prison (behind the camera in this photograph).

At one time there were nearly five hundred street urinals like this one in Paris. They tended to be exceedingly filthy, and this one upholds the tradition—it can be detected by its powerful odor long before one actually sees it (I kid you not). And, amazingly, it is still in use: while I standing preparing to take this photograph, several men stopped their cars, got out, and used the urinal (you can see the feet of one in this photo). More amazing still, they were all wearing suits. And since there is no facility for washing the hands in a vespasienne … and given the French obsession with shaking hands with each other constantly … well, you can draw your own conclusions. I'm surprised that cholera is not still endemic in this city (it was once), since it still has problems with hygiene even after centuries. I couldn't even stand to look inside this vespasienne, and I was flabbergasted that anyone was still using it.

In the early 1960s, the Paris city government decided to start replacing vespasiennes with public pay toilets equipped with attendants, in part for reasons of hygiene, and in part because vespasiennes had become notorious as meeting places for homosexuals. And in the 1980s, the city started installing the self-cleaning, high-tech Sanisette pay toilets, and the vespasiennes finally started to really disappear. I don't miss them.

Incidentally, vespasiennes were named after the ancient Roman emperor Vespasian, who was the first emperor to put a tax on public toilets.

I wonder how many hands the man in this vespasienne shook between the time he used the urinal and the time he finally got around to washing his hands (if he ever did).

Photographed on June 15, 2005.