SAN ANTONIO – San Antonio city officials held a celebration ceremony Thursday for a new kind of restroom.
The restroom, which is a 9-feet-by-18-feet stainless steel structure is located in a high-traffic area on the corner of Alamo and Commerce streets.
"Here's a building that's going to see about 35 million people going through it," said District 1 City Councilman Roberto Treviño. "It's got to be built like a tank and it is. It's going to be durable."
Treviño said the bathroom's innovative design makes it easy to clean and difficult to damage and includes a graffiti-resistant finish.
It's also ADA-compliant and open 24 hours a day.
Debbie Satsky, who was downtown on Thursday during her summer break, said she thinks the new restroom is necessity for the downtown area.
"I think it's great," said Satsky. "When you go down the Riverwalk, some of the stairwells smell like urine because there's not enough places to go to the bathroom, especially for the homeless people around here."
Chris Vega, who is from San Antonio, said he is hoping the city will open up more of these restrooms.
"It's great. Otherwise you kind of get stuck going into some random business, trying to figure it out," said Vega. "But, if you had these all over the city, you can just pop in, do what you got to do, get out. It's clean."
"Doc," who has worked at the nearby Lone Star Cafe, said he takes issue with the restroom's price tag, which is $97,000. "They stink," said "Doc" as he laughed. "They're terrible, for that money, for that price."
However, Trevino said Thursday the value outweighs the cost.
"The reality is we just spent $650,000 renovating, not building, but renovating three sets of bathrooms at Market Square," Trevino said. "We spent $250,000 cleaning these sets of roads and a large part of that is urine and feces."
Trevino also said because San Antonio is a top destination in Texas, this type of bathroom is a necessity.
"You have quite a few people that visit our city," he said. "But you also have people who live here and people who do business here. We want clean, safe streets and this is addressing those issues."
This first standalone bathroom is a test site, but Trevino said they are hoping to learn from this project as they look for other sites to make this more accessible throughout the city.
