Adrianne: This is Underunderstood.
Billy: Hey, crew.
Regina: Hello.
John: Hey, Billy.
Adrianne: Hi.
John: How you feeling, Billy?
Billy: How am I feeling?
John: Yeah.
Billy: I’m feeling better, but we’ve basically all been sick this week, right?
Regina: It’s ironic because we all got sick, even though we don’t record together. So, we have not spent time together. The germs were passed through the waves.
John: I haven’t seen any of you in years. [laughter]
Billy: Yeah, no, I’ve been quarantined in my home with my sick … [coughing] Oh, Regina, Jesus.
Regina: Sorry.
Billy: That could have been any of us.
Regina: I’m not trying to prove a point.
Billy: No, I’ve basically been quarantined at home with my sick 11-month old baby all week, so at the end of the last episode, we said we would be back today. So, here we are. I don’t have a real episode for you. Like I said, we’ve all been sick. But when we first started the show, we did some kind of, like, practice sessions. So, there was a bunch of, like, stories that we pitched back then, that never saw the light of day.
So, I want to revisit one.
Regina: Ooh, what’s it going to be?
Billy: It’s the Pittsburgh Potty.
Adrianne: Oh my God, the Pittsburgh Potty.
Regina: Oh.
Billy: Classic.
John: Yes.
Billy: So, I’m just going to read from this article. This is a stub on Wikipedia. A Pittsburgh toilet, often called a Pittsburgh Potty, is a common fixture in a pre World War II house built in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It consists of an ordinary flush toilet installed in the basement, with no surrounding walls.
John: You said flush toilet, right?
Billy: Yes, a toilet that you flush.
Adrianne: Yes.
John: Not … Okay, not a flesh toilet. [laughter]
Regina: Ew.
Billy: No. Yes, it’s a toilet made of flesh that sits in the middle of an unfinished basement.
Regina: What is a Pittsburgh Potty again? Is it just, it’s just a toilet with no walls around it in the middle of a basement?
Adrianne: It’s, it’s a … Yeah, a toilet in the middle of a basement with no walls.
Billy: Yeah, specifically, an unfinished basement.
Adrianne: It would be weird to have a fully finished basement, like, it’s like, a game room, and there’s a pool table. Next to the pool table, there’s a toilet. [laughter]
John: I think any basement with one of these in it qualifies as unfinished.
Billy: So what? It’s a conversation piece. Yeah, no, this is sort of … Yeah, it would sort of look like, I don’t know, some kind of Saw situation where it’s just like, a grimy basement with a toilet in the middle.
Adrianne: I remember this. And, this is different from when you have two toilets next to each other without a wall between them.
Billy: What? What’s that?
John: Where does that happen?
Adrianne: We definitely …
Regina: No, I don’t remember that.
Adrianne: Did we not talk about this before? I’ve, I’ve seen it multiple times in real life. There is a hookah lounge on East Ninth Street in New York, and in the bathroom, there are two toilets next to each other with no wall in between.
John: What?
Adrianne: It’s a, it’s a thing that I’ve seen many times, that I’ve seen people talk about many times.
Billy: And, what’s, what’s the explanation for that?
Adrianne: I don’t know.
Billy: Oh.
Regina: All right, well, that’s a followup episode.
John: Why is it called the Pittsburgh Potty?
Billy: Well, these are specifically, very common in Pittsburgh. Homes built between, I think it’s 1880 and 1910, almost all of them have this. Or at least, that’s, that’s what I’m led to believe.
John: So, why do they exist?
Billy: Great question. This is actually the mini mystery, because the Wikipedia article says that the reason for these existing is, “largely unverified by historians.” But, there has been some recent reporting on this, which is why I say this isn’t a real episode. You know, I’m not doing the digging myself. But, there are three main explanations. You want to hear them?
John: Yes.
Billy: So, the first one, the first theory is that this was from steel workers coming in after a hard day’s work and needing to clean up. And so, there would be a toilet in the basement. This is the most kind of commonly held theory.
Regina: I guess I don’t understand why there wouldn’t also be a shower or some … Like, why a toilet? You don’t really clean up in the toilet.
Billy: Exactly. Let me play this clip. So, this is from YouTube. This is Peculiar Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Potty, Explained. This is from The Incline.
Speaker: Men would come home the steel mills covered in soot and dirt, and be stinky and sweaty. They would normally come in through a basement door, a cellar door. But before you would go to the main part of the house, because you’d never disrespect your house to go in there with dirt and soot. You go down here, and this was part of the, uh, the beauty of the decontamination of your steel soot, the Pittsburgh Potty.
As far as I know, Pittsburgh is the only place in America that has what we know as the Pittsburgh Potty.
Billy: So, what he said at the end there, Pittsburgh is the only place that you’ll find these, is not true, necessarily. You’ll find these throughout the northeast. Actually, my next door neighbor … It was my only neighbor, I think, on my block who I’ve, like, been in the basement of their house.
John: Weird flex.
Billy: They were moving, and so, like, I walked through the house. And I saw in the basement, the unfinished basement, just a toilet, just sitting there in the middle of the basement. And I was like, “A Pittsburgh Potty.” And she was like, “Yeah.”
And, she kind of thought it was like, oh, this is not going to help me sell the house. But, they had one, and all the houses that are on my block, I think, were built, like, in maybe the 1920’s, uh, give or take.
Anyway, he says that the, these … you’ll only find these in Pittsburgh. That’s not true. But, um, Regina, you were saying this theory doesn’t totally make sense to you.
Regina: Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s just, it’s one thing … you know, maybe you have to use the toilet when you first get home from work, but that’s not really the same as cleaning up.
Billy: Right.
Regina: It’s like, without a sink or a shower, are you cleaning up with the toilet water? What are you doing after you use the toilet? [laughter] It just doesn’t make sense.
Billy: Yeah, I thought the same thing. And it’s weird, because this is like, what most people in Pittsburgh believe to my understanding, that people who have these in their homes, this is kind of just like, how they explain this toilet in their basement. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, steel workers used to use them when they got home.”
So, sometimes they didn’t have sinks or toilets, so that makes this theory weird. But, sometimes they did have sinks and toilets, and sometimes, they even had kitchenettes. And so, that brings us to our second theory. There’s some people that think that maybe these were used by slaves or servants, more likely.
Sarah Kovash: Ted Sellers climbs the stairs to a four-square style home with a large bricked in porch in Crafton Heights. He’s here with a strange request.
Billy: So, this is from a story by Sarah Kovash, at 90.5 WESA in Pittsburgh. Kovash did a story on this called Documenting the Pittsburgh Potty, An Architectural Mystery in Our Basements. This was kind of initiated by this guy who had been going house to house asking people if he could take pictures of their Pittsburgh toilets so that he could make a coffee table compilation.
Speaker: Hey.
Sarah Kovash: Hi.
Speaker: I’m doing an art project about basement toilets, old fashioned …
Regina: Love it.
Billy: So, Kovash in her reporting, obviously encountered the steel workers narrative. But she couldn’t get any historians to take a stab at verifying that claim, or really offering any other theory. But Steven Cummings, a realtor that she talked to, offered an additional theory.
Steven Cummings: Some really large older houses I’ve seen all over the city, if they’re large enough, they have signs of what was possibly even a kitchen in the basement, as well as, uh, a bathroom. And yeah, I think that that could show that they had servants living in the basement, or using the basement as living quarters.
Billy: So, slaves seems unlikely, based on the timeline.
Regina: Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Billy: Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition act. That was in 1780. Vermont, technically, was the first to abolish slavery. They did it written into their Constitution in 1777, but Pennsylvania did this gradual transition out of slavery in 1780. So, it just seems based on the timeline, that this wouldn’t be something that was made to accommodate for people who had slaves in that sense.
But there’s also plenty of gray area. You know, there are definitely people who had servants at the time. That’s stuff definitely affected the way homes were designed. You know, the … You’ll find in, like, nicer homes they’ll have special, like, servant stairs that lead to their own quarters and their own kitchens and pantries, so that they can kind of like, run the house while remaining relatively unseen.
But again, you’ll find these Pittsburgh Potty’s in sort of the smallest, most blue collar, most working class homes in Pittsburgh. So, it seems unlikely that every new home on a block populated by steel workers in, you know, like the early 1900’s would be designed to keep some kind of second class citizen in the basement.
Adrianne: Right, he said in that thing like, uh, in the houses that are large enough, you can see these … Whatever, but, uh, my understanding was that these are pretty normal houses.
Billy: Yeah. I don’t know, this actually was my original conspiracy theory. I was like, oh yeah, these people, you know, they were definitely, like, keeping slaves. And maybe they were, like, maybe there was shame around it or something. You know, people have kind of covered up the history of slavery more in the north. And so, now we just have these weird, unclear explanations of why there were toilets in people’s basements.
But I don’t know, the more I read and the more I looked into it, I was kind of convinced otherwise. It seemed like the timeline didn’t really match up.
So, after Sarah Kovash published that story, she started hearing from people, and she did a followup segment, actually, on a new theory that someone brought to her attention. Any guesses as to what that might be?
John: So, are they all functional? Like, water still runs through all these?
Billy: They are all functional, yes.
John: Um, how often are they removed from the homes?
Billy: That’s a good question. I don’t know, it doesn’t …
John: Like, do people remove these from their homes ever?
Billy: It doesn’t seem … No, it doesn’t seem likely, because it’s expensive to put a toilet in. So, I think what is more likely, unless the house is, like, completely torn down or something, what’s more likely is that someone finishes their basement, and they either …
John: Builds a bathroom around it.
Billy: Yeah, they enclose the toilet.
John: Yep.
Billy: Or, they find some kind of solution for that.
John: Well, I’m wondering if, like, because in the plumbing in a home, all of the toilets are connected in some way. I’m wondering if they’re, like, vital to making all of the toilets in a home work?
Billy: Okay, this is a good …
Regina: Oh, interesting.
Billy: This is a good thread you’re on. So, I’m going to play this thing from Sarah Kovash’s followup story with a theory related to that.
Speaker: 90.5 WESA’s Sarah Kovash spoke to New Jersey architect, William Martin who studied at Carnegie Mellon University. He says these basement toilets weren’t designed for steel workers. In fact, they weren’t even meant to be used.
William Martin: It started around the mid 1800’s, you know, the large cities, especially in the northeast, uh, began to put, uh, sewers into the streets. And, when a sewer backed up, it would back up, and it fills up the pipe like you’re filling up a jar. And eventually, you’re going to reach the point where you fill up the jar, and it starts to spill over. So the idea was to put a toilet fixture in the basement, and that’s why they’re by themselves. Because, they really weren’t meant to be used.
Sarah Kovash: So, why put a toilet down there? Why not just leave a drain?
William Martin: Uh, the drain isn’t big enough. It’s a small aperture. The toilet is the largest fixture that’s connected to the system, so if there’s going to be a backup, it will come out of the toilet in the basement. You need to give it the simplest way to get out.
Regina: That is gross.
Adrianne: That’s wild. I love that theory. Is that true?
Billy: It seems very likely, from the way he explains it. So, that’s sort of where this thing stands as of right now.
Adrianne: So, this is like, a reverse toilet. You’re not supposed to put stuff down it. You’re just supposed to let stuff come out of it.
Billy: Right, yeah. Before they kind of worked out the kinks of the sewer systems so that, uh, you know, occasionally, the, the lowest level thing on your plumbing system wouldn’t spew sewage out of it, uh, if there was a backup. [laughter]
John: Wait, and this was, like, economical, like, to put a porcelain toilet into the basement for this reason?
Billy: I guess, yeah. Because otherwise, they would have to make some kind of proprietary thing. Like he’s saying, it’s, it’s kind of the largest, uh, off the shelf thing you could get to put there.
John: Jeez.
Billy: So, yeah, unless they made some kind of proprietary thing that was similar to a toilet. But like, at that point, you might as well just have a toilet down there. But regardless, there’s not really any super hard evidence that any of these one theories are true. You know, there’s not like, some plan or journal from when these homes were built that says in, in clear writing what the purpose is.
Regina: How is it possible? This was not that long ago.
Billy: Yeah.
Regina: It’s not like this is before recorded history. We know a lot about 1910.
Billy: Well, that’s why I thought … That’s why I had the conspiracy that it had to be some kind of coverup. Like, yeah, maybe this, these were for servants? Right, because otherwise, though, you’d think there’d be some kind of record. But I don’t know, maybe it has something to do with, like, the speed and scale these homes were built at or something.
So it’s funny to, it’s funny to me that so many people have these in their homes in Pittsburgh and in other areas in the northeast, and they don’t even really know why. It’s just this mystery in their basement, in the form of a toilet.
John: Do, did you ask your neighbor why she had one?
Billy: She didn’t really know. I asked her about the Pittsburgh Potty thing. But, I’m glad you asked that question, because while I haven’t found the definitive answer as to why these things exist, I did stumble into an answer to another question about the Pittsburgh Potty.
If you’re not a steel worker, and you don’t have servants, and you don’t have to worry about the sewer spewing up into your lowest level toilet like a geyser, is there any reason why any reasonable person could possibly want a random toilet in the middle of their unfinished basement? And, I did sort of find an answer to that question.
Andrea Allen: Hey guys, how’s it going?
Speaker 13: Good, how are you?
Andrea Allen: Good. So, you think this is going to work?
Billy: So, this is Andrea Allen. She is a coworker of mine. We both work for a company called Smashcut now. But if you ever used to hang out on Vimeo back in the day, there’s a good chance you know her, because she was a big part of the Vimeo community. She ran the content team there.
Regina: Cool.
Billy: She recently moved from Newark to Kansas City. Her and her husband had a baby, and they wanted to buy a house and be closer to their folks, who both happen to be within an hour of Kansas City. Anyway, they found a place. They moved in recently, and they’ve been kind of chipping away at making the place their own. You know, making the house a home. And, the other day, she told me about something they decided to add to the unfinished part of their basement.
John: Oh no, oh no, oh no.
Andrea Allen: We had a plumber come out, and he installed a toilet in the corner of a large unfinished portion of our basement. So, it’s a big, a big throne room, if you will.
John: Why?
Regina: Did the … Who is the contractor for this? And when she told the contractor, “This is what I want,” what was their reaction?
Adrianne: Yeah.
Billy: So, I asked her to record on her iPhone.
Adrianne: Okay.
John: Oh my God.
Andrea Allen: Can you do, you guys do a lot of these? Or is this abnormal? I don’t know.
Speaker 2: Um …
Speaker 2: No, we … I mean, we see everything.
Andrea Allen: Yeah?
Speaker 2: But there’s, there’s nothing wrong with putting this in here, because that just shoots straight out, so …
Billy: They said that they had never heard of a Pittsburgh Potty. And she asked them, like, “Oh, do you do a lot of these?” And they’re like, “Oh, we see a little bit of everything.”
Regina: What?
Andrea Allen: I asked him, you know, is this fairly normal to do? Or, is this kind of an out, outlandish thing? And he said, “Oh, no, we’ve seen it all. We see everything in my line of work.”
Billy: It’s not cheap to get a toilet added to a home. And they made the intentional decision to add a toilet to the unfinished part of their basement. There’s, like, a finished part, and there’s unfinished part, and they wanted a toilet in the unfinished part.
Andrea Allen: We have a 10-month-old baby, and she goes to sleep fairly early. She goes to sleep around 8:00 p.m. And for us, that’s the time, then, it’s like, my husband and I, we, we watch our stories. Or you know, we just do, you know, things that could be kind of loud. So, we’ve been using the basement. And, we have a lot of creaky floorboards, so as we ascend up the stairs to have to go to the rest room, you run the risk of waking her up. So, it’s like, a maneuver to try to, like, figure out which floorboards aren’t going to creak, and you got to be extra quiet. And then, you’re afraid to flush the toilet.
Whereas, downstairs now, we can just use it and be free, without, without the risk of waking up the 10-month-old sleeping baby. So, it’s pretty amazing. It’s, it’s very freeing, and then just, you know, the convenience factor. It’s, it’s awesome.
Billy: Is this, like, planting a flag by putting this toilet here? Is this an aspirational toilet for what could be built around it?
Andrea Allen: One hundred percent. This is the first step … You know, the plan eventually, like, phase two, will be putting in the trappings of a, of a typical bathroom. But we’re just on phase one right now, which is the toilet. Which actually, is pretty amazing to have down there. It’s, it’s a little bit of a lifestyle change for the better.
Billy: So, the toilet was sort of like, a, a down payment on the future potential of your basement.
Andrea Allen: Definitely. And I’ll say this, though, like the future potential is big. But I can also see a world where this toilet just sits … It is the way it is for a long time. Because, it’s already, like, proven to be so useful and so, you know just like, clutch. This could potentially be something that 10 years from now, I’ll look and be like, “You know, we should really finish off that bathroom.” But in the meantime it works, it works perfectly.
Billy: So there you have it, the Pittsburgh Potty is not just for people in Pittsburgh or steel workers, or people with servants, or …
John: And it’s not just in old homes.
Billy: Yeah, not just in old homes. There are …
Regina: Some people are into bidets.
Billy: I mean, if it’s, if the third explanation we got is actually true, it can kind of function as a bidet when the sewer backs up. Anyway, while some people may look at their Pittsburgh Potty and speculate about the past, there are also people like Andrea who deliberately get one installed in the present, as an aspirational toilet. And, plant it as a flag that represents what is possible in the future. A potty full of potential.
John: Hey, thanks for listening. Underunderstood is Billy Disney, Adrianne, Jeffries, Regina Dellea, and me, John Lagomarsino. If you like our show and you want more of it, you can check out our website. It’s underunderstood.com. There you’ll find full transcripts, extra links to all the stuff we talk about in the episodes, photos, extra stories, all kinds of stories, underunderstood.com.
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Thanks again for listening. We will hopefully, all four of us, be convalesced next week with a new episode and the credits read by all four of us. See you then.