Inside the taboo, bizarre, revealing world of stadium bathrooms

INSIDE A WOMEN'S restroom on the southwest concourse of Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Scott Jenkins, the stadium's general manager, reaches down and, without hesitating, places his right hand on the floor. Uric acid, he says -- you know, the corrosive compound in our urine that often gets spilled by the gallon inside stadium bathrooms just like this one -- can eat through regular epoxy-based paint in practically no time at all. Which is why, before the $1.6 billion MBS opened in 2017, Jenkins made sure every one of his bathroom floors was coated in the shiny, space-age, dual-system polymer under his fingertips right now. It's called MMA, or methyl methacrylate, and, judging by Jenkins' reaction, this is the first time anyone's ever bothered to ask about it. "Oh, I'm geeking out right now," he laughs. "I love potty talk."

When it comes to the home of Super Bowl LIII and the taboo, bizarre but often revealing world of stadium bathrooms, well, there's quite a lot to discuss.

In Atlanta, most visitors want to know more about the flower-petal retractable roof, the 360-degree, 1,100-foot halo video screen or the 1,260 beer taps. Nobody ever discusses the building's 30 percent increase over the Georgia Dome in female toilets (22 percent for the men), the swan-neck, stainless steel hands-free faucets that actually match the building's architecture or the drum-sized JBL ceiling speakers that give the toilets better sound than most of the nightclubs in Buckhead. It's a shame, really, since the ugly (and, yes, slightly gross) truth of the matter is that the stadium bathrooms will probably end up having a much greater impact on the overall fan experience at the Super Bowl, an event often plagued by ridiculously long lines at the loo.

"You add a restaurant or a walkway feature to the stadium, some people will use it, but everyone is going to use the restroom," Jenkins says. "So the functionality, the quantity, the aesthetics of your bathrooms is critical. It seems unremarkable to most people, but, trust me, you invite 70,000 people to your house and you get the bathrooms wrong -- you've got a huge problem."

Just ask the folks in Minneapolis. At the Super Bowl, where crowds produce -- wait for it -- about 8,000 gallons of urine and where more wastewater (nearly a million gallons) is used than what flows over Niagara Falls every second, the bathrooms are often a crowded, disgusting, leaky time bomb. Horrific conditions and outrageous lines at the bathroom have become as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as lame commercials and Bill Belichick hoodies. "The restroom experience will make or break a fan's experience, especially at the Super Bowl," says Kathryn Anthony, an architecture professor at the University of Illinois and a board member of the American Restroom Association. "And, more often than not, my guess is it makes it more unpleasant."

Sure enough: During Super Bowl LII, even at the brand new billion-dollar U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, a building equipped with 979 toilets, while most female fans breezed in and out of the bathrooms, lines for the men's rooms snaked all the way across the concourse. The long waits meant male fans who spent upward of 30 minutes in line and paid $5,000 for a ticket -- the going rate on the street -- were essentially forced to pay $1,000 to pee. After decades of subtle but powerful gender discrimination in this part of stadiums, building codes now require teams to provide at least a 2-to-1 female-to-male toilet ratio. Which means, if sociologists are right, and public restrooms do, in fact, reflect our cultural values, then the contrast in bathroom lines at last year's Super Bowl might have also signaled a seismic shift in the evolving demographics, and power dynamics, of sports fandom.

And you thought stadium bathrooms were just a place to get rid of all that beer. Think again.

"That toilet seat," Anthony says, "is now just as important as your Super Bowl seat."

Outrageous lines at the bathroom have become as much a part of Super Bowl Sunday as lame commercials and Bill Belichick hoodies. Edmund D. Fountain for ESPN

IN 2013, BEFORE a $300 million renovation of Wrigley Field, the Chicago Cubs surveyed their fans to find out what elements of the grand old stadium were considered sacred and untouchable. "One thing that became crystal clear was that we should not disturb or destroy the historic features of Wrigley Field that fans have come to know and love," says Julian Green, the team's vice president of communications.

The top choices were easy to guess: the iconic ivy, the hand-operated scoreboard and the brick backstops. But the final part of the stadium that fans insisted on being preserved puzzles the team to this day. "One of those historic features," Green says, "was the urinal troughs."

Although they are nearly extinct now, decades ago most older stadiums (and prisons) featured the medieval restroom relic known as the urinal trough. The urinal itself was patented in 1866 by New York inventor Andrew Rankin and made famous in 1917 by dadaist Marcel Duchamp, whose "Fountain" sculpture is considered one of the most influential works in art history. But the urinal trough? That has been around since the beginning of time. The apparatus is a large, communal urinal that offers an egalitarian, and highly efficient, method of elimination while forcing men to pee like cattle -- shoulder-to-shoulder, with zero privacy, and often while facing each other's junk. Few things evoke our deep, strange, love-hate relationship with stadium bathrooms like the urinal trough: a toilet-trigger that has launched a million cases of paruresis, shy bladder syndrome, and inspired a million more U-S-A! chants.

But most places, like the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, New York, have openly celebrated the removal of their last urinal trough. (For historic reference, there's the grainy YouTube video from 2011 showing a person, incorrectly ID'd as a Cubbies fan, using a urinal trough as a Slip 'n Slide.) The request by Cubs fans was so rare, in fact, that the team had to have new troughs custom fabricated -- because no one actually makes them anymore.

"When people come here to watch nine innings of baseball, they don't want to spend three innings waiting to use the restroom," Green says. "There's some nostalgia with them, too. I don't claim to be a social scientist as it relates to male camaraderie in the restroom. But I do think there's a sense of, if you go to any sports stadium, the men's rooms do become sort of a communal space."

With one World Series win in the past century, public humiliation might just be permanently imbedded in the Cubbies' collective consciousness. Or, perhaps, Cubs fans just understand and appreciate the bizarre bonding that is part of the shared scatological experience of surviving a stadium bathroom. If you've been to a major sporting event, chances are you have a bathroom story to share: either a recommendation (the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, featuring bathrooms with nursing stations for moms, is one of the few sports facilities to make Cintas' America's Best Restroom Hall of Fame) or a warning (if you're at a Raiders game, hold it). Stadium toilets are, after all, a very public place often crowded with inebriated strangers where we must perform an act that, since childhood, has been deeply ingrained in our psyche as private and shameful. The self-consciousness and shame can be so crippling that public bathrooms in Japan are often equipped with The Sound Princess, a device that broadcasts the sound of flushing toilets to mask any natural noises. No wonder, then, that the confluence of so many Freudian taboos in such a small, strange space, escalated by the anxiety and aggression we already feel while supporting our beloved sports teams, inspires an almost never-ending stream of hysterical behavior.

One of the few remaining highlights in Buffalo each fall are the seemingly annual reports of Bills fans having sex in the decrepit restrooms at Ralph Wilson Stadium. In 2017, New York Mets fan Tom McDonald honored the dying wish of his childhood friend Roy Riegel, a plumber, by flushing Riegel's ashes, one spoonful at a time, down the toilets in at least 16 major league ballparks. McDonald and Riegel grew up Mets fans in Queens. "For Roy, this is the perfect tribute to a plumber, a baseball fan and just a brilliant, wild guy," McDonald told The New York Times. Often, while committing his friend to the Citi Field sewer, McDonald uses the facilities as well. "I always flush in between, though," he says.

At Arthur Blank's insistence, the Falcons covered every available bathroom wall with 50-inch TVs to keep fans connected to the game at all times. David Goldman/AP Photo

IN 1988, WHILE, of course, waiting in line to use the bathroom, Sandra Rawls, then an assistant professor of interior design, wondered about the power structures and social orders reflected in our public restrooms. Women typically take longer in the bathroom. What Rawls wanted to figure out was exactly how much longer, and why.