“Homelessness is a humiliating nightmare; you can’t even use the bathroom after certain hours without threat of arrest.” – G.W. Rolle

It’s after 8 p.m. on December 20. I am leaving the National Homeless Person’s Memorial Day service with Mary Cash (a.k.a. Ms. Mary), a St. Vincent de Paul South Pinellas board member and my tour guide for the evening. She'd told me at the end of the service that she wanted to show me something, and now she's leading me across the street to see the Williams Park restrooms. If this seems odd, consider that these restrooms are the most frequented by St. Petersburg’s homeless population, and that St. Petersburg’s homeless population is Ms. Mary’s number one concern.

The scene we encounter (see photos below) is reminiscent of the 1996 cult classic Trainspotting: toilet seats covered in piss or altogether missing; graffiti on the walls; not a drop of soap in sight. I imagine myself being sucked into a shit-filled toilet, high on heroin in some seedy dive bar, first thing in the morning. But no — I am completely sober, in a facility that the City of St. Petersburg claims is cleaned twice a day by hired staff. I’d have to see it to believe it.

After-hours access to restrooms has been an ongoing problem for St. Petersburg’s homeless, who are shunned from using private facilities in, say, Starbucks, and are left high and dry late at night, when park restrooms close. After that, there is nowhere to go but in public, and that’s illegal. However, doing anything about it has proven to be a challenge for the City and other homeless advocacy groups.

This article appears in Dec 23-29, 2009.