Our feature OKI Wanna Know is a chance for you to ask a question that's been gnawing at you, but feels a little weird to ask. This week, we investigate basement toilets and named buildings.
Chris Wales lives in a house built in 1939 in College Hill. It has a toilet in the basement.
"It seems most of my neighbor's homes have them, too. I've been around other homes in the city, such as Pleasant Ridge. I've seen that same feature," he says. "I always figure when they were building these homes, they started the foundation, they added it as a Porta Potty essentially for the construction crews. Probably not the answer, but I'm curious what they might have been there for primarily."
Beth Johnson is our go-to when it comes to historic architecture. She's the executive director of the Cincinnati Preservation Association.
She says basement toilets are very common, especially around Cincinnati. The city got indoor plumbing with the purchase of what we now call Greater Cincinnati Water Works in 1839. Johnson says the sewer system came along a little later.
"City-wide there wasn't an effort to put in sewers until the 1870s," she says. "It was not that great. It was kind of piece-mealed together."
Johnson says the early sewers were unpredictable and prone to problems.
"And it would backup in the places where the water would originally go out, like bathtubs and toilets. So the toilet in the basement is for the backups. It wasn't normally used."
She says that explains why so many of these basement toilets are often sitting out in the open, without walls around them. Privacy wasn't really a necessity.
"Because of that backup, they also wanted the smell of that to be as far away as possible. They didn't want overflow coming into their nice bathrooms on the tile, or whatever they had in there," she says. "And so in the basement it would be easy to clean up and also the smell would be further away."
Johnson says sometimes, they're called Pittsburgh potties, because that city also has a fair share of them. The theory is men who worked in dirty jobs could clean themselves up in the basement before joining the family in the rest of the house.
"But obviously here in Cincinnati we didn't have the coal mines that they did. We still had the factories and jobs that would be dirty, so it's definitely a possibility," Johnson says. "Often times there wasn't necessarily a sink with them. Sometimes it was just the toilet. If there wasn't a sink and there was just a toilet it was most likely for the backup."
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Curiously, Chris Wales' downstairs throne is in a corner, and walled off.
We have another question about architectural history. It comes from Julia Slusher in Hyde Park.
"I want to know why there's random names above the doorways on buildings throughout Hyde Park. Just wanted to know more about my neighborhood."
The names aren't unique to Hyde Park or Cincinnati. You can find them across the country.
The Cincinnati Preservation Association's Johnson says it's all about marketing.
"It was a way to distinguish the apartment complex. A lot of these apartment complexes were going up in the 1800s, beginning of the 1900s, and then the 1920s and '30s is when apartments became very popular."
She says before then, American cities had tenement houses, and the new apartment buildings were a little more glamorous.
"And that's when you start seeing them Downtown on some of the larger apartment buildings or residential buildings that were a little bit more prestigious," she says. "Especially, when you starting getting in the hills — Hyde Park, Walnut Hills, you'll start seeing those as people moved out of the basin, it was for, in a way, better, nicer housing."
The names are sometimes carved in stone, and other times painted on glass. Johnson says they were often formal, or exotic sounding.
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"Often they would try to have some sort of connection to the owner, like La Tosca, there was a name within that family: Tosca," she says. "Other ones, it was formal names, like the Alexandra over in Walnut Hills was designed by the Emerys, and they would use very formal names. Other ones, like obviously the Emery Theater, where the Emery Apartments are were named after the family."
The practice continues today. Only the names are often in neon, or plastic, instead of glass or stone.
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This story has been changed to fix a factual error.
