Photograph by Martha Williams
I love the Piedmont Park Robot Bathroom.
Not because it’s pretty or pleasant. A basic green-and-stainless-steel box, this public bathroom was designed to be vandal-resistant, fully automated, and self-cleaning. It was a futuristic eyesore when it was installed in 2008, inside the stately Charles Allen Gate. Outside, it looks like a misplaced elevator. Inside, as one Department of Parks & Recreation employee told me, “It looks like a prison toilet.”
After 16 years, the unit is showing its age. The door wobbles open and closed, sometimes auto-locking with no one inside. The sensors have lost their sensitivity, so getting soap, water, and toilet paper is a game of charades. A glitchy piano soundtrack stops and restarts. The floor is slightly flooded, but the toilet works.
There’s always a line to use the Robot Bathroom. After Piedmont Park’s other restrooms are locked for the night at 6 p.m., it is one of the only free toilets in Atlanta’s premier public park. On a recent spring evening, the park was thronged with fit young Atlantans playing Frisbee, running hills, and picnicking. Eight or nine people lined up for the Robot Bathroom, chatting patiently. Behind them, a row of 20 zip-tied port-a-potties stood waiting for a weekend festival. Where else could these people go?
This is how the Robot Bathroom earned a fond nickname and years of online tributes. Reviews on Google (average rating: 3.7 stars) and Yelp (3.3 stars) read like essays, confessions, and dramatic monologues. One reviewer was grateful that she could take her dog inside. Another praised the air-conditioning. Others shrugged but still showed support: “This is definitely a bathroom. Safe and clean-ish.” At press time, it was ranked number four on Yelp’s Atlanta “Local Flavor” list, which includes the Krog Street Tunnel and Blondie from Clermont Lounge.
Piedmont Park’s Robot Bathroom is not only an oddball destination; it’s the product of many years of sustained, compassionate activism. In the 1980s, advocates began calling for a solution to the decades-old problem of lack of access to public toilets, particularly for people who survive on Atlanta’s streets. Members of the Open Door Community proclaimed that everyone had the right to “pee for free with dignity.” In the lead-up to the 1996 Olympics, Mayor Bill Campbell and City Council President Marvin Arrington Sr. negotiated with downtown developers and business leaders to build permanent public restrooms, but those plans fizzled. Finally, in 2005, the city’s Regional Commission on Homelessness, led by Bill Bolling, initiated a $1.5 million investment in five automated public facilities, a state-of-the-art solution that had worked in New York City and Seattle but had never been tried here.
With such a high price tag, critics called the initiative a “royal flush” of taxpayer money. But today, when you calculate the cost of safe, decent public restrooms, the investment seems visionary and generous.
You wouldn’t know any of this backstory at Piedmont Park, where the Robot Bathroom is not stigmatized as an amenity for the poor and unsheltered, but is shared by everybody. As Atlanta prepares for the World Cup in 2026, our automated public facilities could use some love and a tune-up. I would cheer to see many more of them installed, adding “local flavor” and basic dignity to areas all over the city. Our Robot Bathrooms are an unsung success story; when we make life a bit easier for our most vulnerable residents, everyone benefits.
This article appears in our August 2024 issue.
