Public Toilet Art, x 3

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During the 1850’s, an exceptionally bright & progressive man purchased remote acreage where 300-year-old oak trees stood. Seasonal wetlands fed those.

There, he raised a family. The man became famous for his devotion to natural sciences & tireless advocacy for public education.

His son went on to be a renowned naturalist. As he was an explorer, the family’s presence at their ancestral home waned over time. Meanwhile, the population encroaching on the old growth oak forest steadily grew.

1929, neighbors of the original family built a fancy prairie style house on the grounds. There, they became authors of note. But eventually, the entire site fell to neglect.

In the 1970’s, a multinational corporation proposed building a massive facility on the site. Trees had already been felled. Bulldozers were poised.

Then the local community rallied around. Public protests were held. The company yielded and the original estate was saved.

These days that once famous corporation is a mere shadow of its former self, while under the watchful eye of devoted citizens, the old growth oak forest and accompanying seasonal wetlands thrive.

The prairie style home serves as a high-end wedding venue. At some point, a public restroom was built to accommodate guests. In that, these finely made tiles appropriately honor the impressionistic past.

Except they’re laid into the floor!

Each and every time I use the facility, I’m struck by how disrespectful that is to the craft it took to make them. You know, considering guy’s propensity to splatter.

Outside the entrance, this colorfully exuberant woman faces the men’s toilet, rather than her own.

I expect she’s overjoyed at never having to swab that floor.

*

Some miles northwest along a river that once served as a canoe trail for indigenous peoples, amidst a marshy Sugar Maple and Burr Oak forest, during the 1920’s rich folk built weekend getaway log cabins so to escape the stinking coal dust choked city that with wealth given power they ruled.

That select group included the son of a steel company magnate, such industry even then transforming the world for both good and ill.

Curiously, these privileged retreats lacked plumbing. Which means one way or the other, they peed in the woods.

When in 1938 word got out that significant adjacent acreage was to be sold, the steel scion bought it. He hired a famous designer to build a ‘gentleman’s farm’ of whitewashed agricultural structures, where he raised Arabian horses.

A true gentleman’s pursuit, if ever there was one.

In 1942 the man added a splendid Greek revival summer home, which his family used until 1972.

Then the place lay more or less dormant until 1984, when a consortium of local residents and environmental interests convinced the county forest preserve district to secure the site's future.

Today, its educational programs carry national resonance.

The art in the visitor center’s public toilets doesn’t honor the past. Rather, with manifest skill they accurately represent denizens of land, water and air that were once native to it and these days, are once again.

Practicality leading to simple common respect, this fine crafted art is placed well above waist high on the walls. Well beyond even the most wayward man’s casual reach.

*

Finally…

Starting long about the end of the last ice age and lasting until the industrial age subsumed everything around it, along a different indigenous river route a flood prone forest of remarkable richness and diversity thrived.

By the time those woods became my favorite childhood haunt, ravaging Buckthorn strangled it near to death and the river was carpeted by bloodworms.

Boys being boys, we peed wherever and whenever at will. Much like the landed gentry in days of yore.

Over the last 50 years, prodigious restorative efforts have taken hold.

When this past spring these woods flooded, I caught a semblance of forest primaeval that hadn’t existed since generations before I was born.

A place where life then death and life again perennially sustains itself.

I figured then that if there’s any modern art to be found onsite, that’s it.

Except at today’s busy trailhead, there’s sometimes a portable toilet provided for public convenience. Unisex, by design. Tiny. Often filthy. I try very hard to avoid these.

But when you gotta go, you gotta go and that morning, I surely did.

Inside, vivid yellow strokes slashed against a dark background presented a symbolically direct, yet ultimately ineffectual visual message. Because I can't imagine any modern, gilded age billionaire need ever use a public porta potty.

And preaching to the already converted is too often just like pissing in the wind.