Queen of Peaches

One of the things I’ve always found most romantic about truly knowing a city is one’s ease with the mundane.

Where you go grocery shopping. Where you get your hair cut. What deli has the shortest lines and the most entertaining customer service at lunchtime.

During the summer that I studied abroad in London during college, I opted not to take as many weekend trips to out-of-town destinations as the majority of my American classmates. It was for a number of reasons, not least of which was that I didn’t care as much about the quantity of sites I could lay my eyes upon as the quality of my relative intimacy with a handful of very specific places.

That summer, I privileged wanting to know every nuance of the precise route I would walk to my local tube station and the precise shadings of light on the Thames as the sun went down well after 9:30 pm throughout the month of July. Sure, I visited Stonehenge once, and it was awesome and super-cool and of course I’m glad that I went.

But I cherish every bit as much my memory of the three-digit code I had to punch to gain access to the main hallway of the office where I unexpectedly landed an unpaid internship, and the way that hallway smelled faintly of cleaning supplies and mildew and pencil shavings, and the fact that every day I carried with me this great little satchel from Eddie Bauer, which was just big enough to fit my portable CD player and a couple CDs (primarily all the Divine Comedy albums that I’d just purchased at the HMV in Piccadilly Circus).

So, in that spirit, I would like to offer you my extremely unscientific, terribly biased, and completely un-comprehensive guide to the Best Places to Pee in the City of Chicago.

I drink a lot, constantly, all the time—water, coffee, green juice, kombucha, bubble tea, occasional beer and wine and whisky. Consequently, I have to pee a lot, often when I’m running errands or when I don’t otherwise have easy access to a bathroom. Over the years, I’ve figured out a few reliable places where I can dash in, dash out, and get on with my life. Some of them require a tiny bit of psychic armor, to make yourself blend in to places you might not 100% belong, but most of them are well and truly public.

FIRST AND FOREMOST, though—a giant RIP to the bathrooms at Native Foods in Wicker Park. I always thought of them as my clever little secret, but apparently they weren’t so secret after all. One of the last times my boyfriend and I were in that neighborhood, I was utterly distraught to find a lock on the bathroom door, with a sign indicating that they were only available for paying customers. Like, of course a restaurant’s bathrooms should be primarily for paying customers. But what an incredible bummer that these animal welfare-obsessed vegans would feel the need to so suddenly, so flagrantly enforce it after several years of being groovy about leaving them open.

Whole Foods
Is this obvious? It seems pretty obvious. Nevertheless, your local Whole Foods is a pretty great place to pee when you’re out and about. Who could possibly prove that you weren’t there to shop, stopped in to pee real quick, then couldn’t find the thing you were looking for and unfortunately had to leave the store empty handed? Anyway, that’s at least the story I tell myself if I’m feeling conspicuous. Depending on the day of the week, I’m most frequently near the one on Huron in River North (I love being able to skirt back out onto the street through the door that’s supposed to be reserved for residents of One Superior Place), the one on Ashland in Lakeview (this one’s a little dodgy to get in and out of since you have to walk a gauntlet of cashiers, but the ones who work there luckily tend to be too stoned to notice), and the new one on Broadway in Edgewater (pretty sure the bathrooms and coffee shop area in this new store have their own zip code—the building is SO BIG). The dangerous part, of course, is the high likelihood of being seduced on the way in or out by gourmet chocolate bars and fancy jars of stone-ground pumpkin seed butter, thereby potentially making it an extremely expensive trip per flush.

The Food Court at the Merchandise Mart
This location is actually temporarily closed right now while they’re remodeling the main seating area of the food court. But, they’ve helpfully redirected folks to a second bathroom location just down the hall on the other side of the McDonald’s. I’d never been in these bathrooms until very recently, so I’m not sure if they’re brand-new brand-new, or just newly remodeled. At any rate, they’re top notch—very clean and spacious. I’m so rarely in that area on weekends that I can’t really vouch for their status on Saturdays and Sundays, but during the work week, this one is a no-nonsense godsend for efficiency and anonymity.

The Ground Level Shops at the Palmer House Hilton
A couple summers ago, I was in the throes of a self-diagnosed UTI that was just bad enough to be inconvenient and annoying without quite being bad enough to schedule a doctor’s appointment about, so I was self-medicating with copious quantities of cranberry juice and cranberry supplements. I’d just picked up a new bottle of capsules at Kramer’s Health Foods on Wabash and figured there would be a Starbucks in the nearby Palmer House shopping area where I could buy a bottle of water as an outwardly “official” excuse to use their bathroom. Well, as luck would have it, there’s actually a three-stall public bathroom right across the hall from the Starbucks. I love staying in hotels so much that I secretly get a big thrill out of walking through here when I need to use this bathroom. I always pretend that I’m a spy or some kind of glamorous high-profile corporate ballbuster when I go clacking down the echoing corridors.

Second Floor of the Center on Halsted
This one could technically be filed as a subheading under the Whole Foods options, but since the Center is its own entity, I’ll count it separately. Especially if you eschew the often crowded and less than well-maintained bathroom on the ground level immediately adjacent to the bakery-side entrance to the Whole Foods and head upstairs to the spacious, industrial bathrooms instead. The signage designates them for male- and female-identified people, and there are gender-neutral facilities nearby as well, which is an obvious, awesome bonus.

2828 North Clark
Don’t get on the elevators or escalators! Jog up the first set of stairs immediately in front of you, go up the ramp, and turn to the left. It’s a tiny three-stall bathroom at an awkward angle because of the weird layout of the building, and sometimes it can be less than immaculately clean, but this is a great option in this part of the city where, as things get fancier and fancier, it becomes more difficult to find a place where you can pee for free. Just be careful not to count on using it if you’re leaving a movie late at night; they lock ’em down once most of the shops have closed.

OK, Chicago—what have I missed? Let me know if you have a favorite place to pee on the sly.

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