Teddy Siegel
speaker
63 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Teddy Siegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is Planet Money from NPR. We have all been there. Do you have a restroom I could use? No? No. You're walking around in a town, in a city, and you have got to go. So you pop into a nail salon.
All right. No on the nail salon. You try a smoke shop. I'll try anywhere. I don't care. This is Teddy Siegel. And if you're out in New York City, Teddy's got your back. Are you a public toilet influencer?
She's being humble. Teddy's created this crowdsourced, publicly accessible Google map.
Of all the places you can just walk into and use the bathroom.
Churches, bookstores, hotels. Barnes and Noble is like close-ish that way. It started in New York and now includes the U.S. and a bunch of other countries. It's called Got2Go.
It all started a few years ago when she was new to the city. She was out shopping and needed to go, but no store would let her use their bathroom. Finally, she went to a McDonald's and they told her she had to buy something to use their bathroom.
And when she did, the bathroom was just there, open, accessible to anyone. Like, she didn't actually have to buy anything. So she went outside and made a TikTok. Guilt-free places to pee in NYC. McDonald's. Then she made another.
And another.
And now, every time she's out in the world, she's adding and subtracting from her bathroom map. We check out a dim sum place.
Everyone just keeps nodding no, no, no. Now, Teddy isn't just a public toilet influencer. She is also a professional opera singer. Is there a toilet song?
desperation.
And so in the middle of Manhattan, flanked by skyscrapers, while cars and people whiz by, she starts to sing.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris out here in these streets using crowdsourced maps just to find a place to go. Why is this a system we have? There could be a very simple free market solution to all this. We could pay to use a bathroom. Why can't we? Today on the show, we hardly have any public toilets in the US, but we used to, and we also used to have thousands of paid toilets.
This is the story of how they both went away. That is a satisfying flushing sound. It is.
When I set out to understand why it is so hard to find a proper place to pee, I discovered two surprising reasons. Michael and Ira. Two brothers who grew up in Dayton, Ohio in the 1950s and 60s. What kind of kid were you? Were you like a mini beat poet?
This is the younger brother, Michael Gessel. He and Ira had this one pet peeve. Pay toilets.
Pay toilets? Like a pay phone? Think a bathroom, but with a lock on the door. You'd put in a dime and get to use the bathroom. And when Michael was growing up, they were all over the place.
Cities and businesses, they would lease locks from private companies so they could profit off of people's need to go. Newspapers sometimes published how much money the pay toilets made. Like at the San Francisco airport, they brought a net profit of $48,456 in one year, in 1960s money.
And these pay toilets have a fascinating, history. First, when cities started becoming crowded in the late 1800s with industrialization, immigration, there was this problem. Rich people had plumbing, but most other people did not. They just went outside. It was unsightly and diseases could spread.
So cities started putting in free toilets, like in some places, little standalone brick buildings with signs that said comfort station. And pretty quickly, an idea for a new market emerged. In 1893, at the World's Fair in Chicago, pay toilets made their splashy debut. These toilets were an upgrade, Toilet 2.0. These paid toilets had luxuries like attendants and soap and towels.
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