Nearly four years ago, city officials celebrated a modular bathroom planned for Fort Washington Park’s Discovery Playground as proof that New York could build public restrooms faster and cheaper. Today, the bathroom still doesn’t exist, construction costs have climbed to $3.5 million, and porta-potties are standing in as a placeholder while bureaucratic delays grind on.
The project, first included in the 2022 city budget at the urging of then-Councilmember Mark Levine, was supposed to be a prototype. The concept was straightforward: a prefabricated comfort station built offsite, then installed atop a large septic tank, cutting out the costly and time-consuming step of connecting to city sewer lines. Manhattan Community Board 12 approved the design in September 2022, noting it would be “less expensive to build and can be installed more quickly and with less disruption.”
None of that has happened.
“This bathroom has been in purgatory with design changes and legal reviews,” said Merritt Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Riverside Park Conservancy, the group that helps manage the river-adjacent green space. “Meanwhile construction costs are going up, and there’s still no bathroom at this location.”
The delays piled up from multiple directions. Design work, handled entirely in-house by Parks Department employees, was originally supposed to wrap up by April 2023. It didn’t finish until March 2024, a full year behind schedule. Then environmental review stretched the timeline further. Because the site sits close to the Hudson River, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation had to review the project for compliance with watershed regulations.
Technical problems added more time. Parks engineers grew concerned about the original air-conditioning system after problems surfaced in other projects, forcing a full redesign of the HVAC system. A modest cube-like structure containing two small restrooms, a drinking fountain, and storage space became a multi-year regulatory odyssey.
All of this creates an awkward backdrop for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who announced in January his own push to expand the modular restroom concept citywide. Speaking at a press conference in Harlem, he directed the New York City Economic Development Corporation to solicit bids for modular, high-quality public toilets within his first 100 days in office.
“In a city that has everything, the one thing that is often impossible to find is a public bathroom,” Mamdani said.
The mayor isn’t wrong about the problem. Anyone who has spent a Sunday afternoon in any New York City park with children knows the particular anxiety of searching for a restroom. The city’s public bathroom shortage is chronic, embarrassing, and disproportionately felt in neighborhoods with fewer commercial establishments where someone can duck inside.
But the Fort Washington Park situation raises a legitimate question about whether the administration’s optimism is grounded. If a project that was supposed to demonstrate speed and efficiency has been stuck for nearly four years and still hasn’t broken ground, the structural problems clearly run deeper than design choices. Bureaucratic handoffs between city agencies, state environmental review, in-house design capacity, and procurement rules all contributed to the stall. A new mayoral directive doesn’t automatically fix any of those friction points.
The $3.5 million price tag also deserves scrutiny. That figure was the original estimate from 2022. Given that construction costs have continued rising through the delay period, as Birnbaum pointed out, the final number could be higher.
For the families using Discovery Playground right now, the situation is simple: they’ve been waiting years for a permanent bathroom and are still relying on temporary toilets while the city works through problems that were supposed to have been solved already.
Mamdani’s instinct to prioritize public restrooms reflects a genuine quality-of-life issue that city government has neglected for too long. But ambition without a realistic plan to fix the underlying bureaucratic dysfunction will produce more Fort Washington Parks, not fewer. The administration should take a hard look at what went wrong here before it promises New Yorkers that the next round of modular bathrooms will arrive any faster.
