A Public Bathroom, Transformed Into a Gem by the Beach

August 22, 2012, 10:05 am

By VIVIAN YEE

Inside Public Comfort Station 2 on the boardwalk in Brighton Beach, even the trash receptacles are clothed, their utilitarian metal covered in burgundy fabric. The sinks have pink skirts, too, while the mirrors wear garlands of silk flowers, the soap bottles dispense fruit-scented hand cleanser and plastic ferns stand in the corner.

Over the sinks and hand dryers hang laminated tributes to President Obama, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson and people who have died on the beach. Near one entrance hangs a rescued bamboo window blind covered in a brocade curtain, tassels and fake roses. R&B tunes play from a set of speakers. Everything is spotlessly clean.

Welcome to Hazel Chatman's world.

Over her 16 years as the bathroom's summer caretaker, Ms. Chatman has built a layer of kitsch and warmth over the comfort station's sterile metal-and-tile bones, transforming a utilitarian space with 24 toilets and 6 sinks into one of the most unexpected public bathrooms in the city.

But Ms. Chatman never wanted to work in a bathroom.

Her first job with the city's parks department was cleaning Brighton Beach, which she liked because she got to spend her days outside by the sand and the sea. More than 16 years ago, when the department transferred her to clean Public Comfort Station 2, she protested, but was told she had no choice. Still, if she had to spend her workweek inside a bathroom, it was certainly not going to look like a typical public restroom.

“I put my house here,” she said. “I make it nice. I have some incentive to come to work.”

And so in a city where a public bathroom that isn't tiny, smelly or dirty is someth ing of a holy grail, the ladies' room on the Brighton Beach boardwalk is a welcome gem.

Women who walk into the restroom come out marveling at what they've seen. “I never could imagine something so charming,” said Anne Hollande, 56, a Parisian photographer who stumbled on the restroom during a walk down the boardwalk. “And it's because of her. I never go to the bathroom in Coney Island because it's crowded and dirty.”

Ms. Chatman, 64, pays for most of the decorations herself, finding fabrics at discount stores, and it is her distinctive style that marks the bathroom - she does not so much design the space as festoon it with what some might call junk. But as fast as she can put decorations up, thieves steal them, bringing the ladies' room one step closer to its original cheerless state.

One year, she had a family of four human-size rabbit statues she had bought for cheap standing by the stalls, only to have them stolen. The year she worked on the men 's side of the comfort station, which employs its own caretaker, she hung photos of basketball players over the mirrors, only to have those stolen, too.

But “I love it,” she said on a rainy afternoon last week as Ginuwine's “Two Reasons I Cry” played over speakers she keeps in a supply closet. “Don't nothing stop me.” (She now pulls all the decorations down each night and reconstructs them each morning to preserve them from thieves.)

Ms. Chatman, a short, motherly woman who talks slowly and smiles readily, spends her eight-hour days mopping, wiping and beautifying her unassuming bathroom. She always wears the same thing to work: lilac nurse's scrubs for her night job as a nurse's aide, under a blue parks department shirt. Her motto, outlined in decorative signs, is “Live, laugh, love.”

If the restroom is another home for her, the many photos on the walls serve as her family albums. With her two grown children living in Florida, Ms. Chatman l ives by herself in Coney Island, and the smiling faces on her walls constitute what she calls her “beach family”: the young lifeguards who return every summer, the officers who patrol the beach and her fellow bathroom workers.

Then there are the memorials above the hand dryers: one for a young woman shot on the boardwalk last year, another for a little girl who drowned, and a third for a beloved friend, a lifeguard who died of cancer three years ago, having kept his illness a secret from all the beach workers. Ms. Chatman uses her own money to mount the memorial photos on stock backgrounds and laminate them at Staples.

“They say spirits go to the water; maybe this is their way,” said Angel Sanchez, 31, a visitor from Colorado who had stopped to use the bathroom.

But other posters carry a more practical message: “If You Sprinkle When You Tinkle, Please Be Neat and Wipe the Seat,” a sign above the sinks reads. (Another sign urges patrons to pick u p after their dogs.)

As a shrine to the dead and celebration of the living, the ladies' room of Brighton Beach has become something of a center for the beach community. When the beach is sweltering, she brings the lifeguards bottles of water; when it rains, she sets up milk crates for them to sit on under the bathroom's overhang. At 6:15 p.m., when the lifeguards go home and children are still running around unclaimed, Ms. Chatman looks after them while the police try to track down their parents.

“It looks like a neighborhood bathroom,” said Natasha Denysyuk, 28, who moved to Miami from Brooklyn several years ago but had stopped by Brighton Beach on vacation. “It's public, you know, but not really public.”