as well as Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks. He is a regular guest on the History Channel and a contributor to outlets like the New York Daily News, Washington Post, and Philadelphia Inquirer.
Simon applied the Ford Madox Ford-inspired "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, with the following results:
Page 99 of my new book, For Customers Only: Public Bathrooms and the Making of American Inequality, lands readers right smack in the middle of the murder investigation of Edgar L. Eckert, an assistant treasurer for a high-end men’s clothing story in mid-town Manhattan.Learn more about For Customers Only at the University of Chicago Press website.
And it lands them right smack in the middle of a key transition in the book’s trajectory.
On a cool mid-May night in1936, after dinner with a colleague, Eckert, fifty-fours years old, married, and wearing a tailored suit, a gold ring and gold watch, walked towards Times Square. By then, the Bronx resident had lived in the city for almost four decades.
Still, he asked a trio of men how to get to the well-marked subway station a block or two away. They pointed him in the right direction and then followed him into the station, down onto the platform, and then up to a mezzanine and what was later described as an “out of the way” public bathroom.
Just after 2AM, a janitor found Eckert slumped on the bathroom floor, unable to speak and barely conscious. He died a few minutes later.
The police launched a manhunt for the killers and puzzled over Eckert’s movements. That’s what I wrote about on page 99. New York City detectives knew right away that this was a robbery. Eckert’s ring, watch, and wallet were gone, but they also wondered about the “queer” dimensions of the crime. Were the three men hustlers? Had Eckert lured them into a public bathroom for a quick sexual encounter before heading back to his modest outer borough home?
From the time that the first public bathrooms opened in New York in the late 19th Century, men seeking sex with other men (and male presenting people) met at the sinks and in the stalls. The police were alarmed and tried to better surveille these places. Along with allies on the city council, they put laws on the book that outlawed oral sex. But still men engaged in sexual encounters with other men in the city’s public bathrooms and this private act in public disturbed authorities.
After Ecket was killed, New York decided on a new tactic. City officials closed the out-of-the-way bathroom where Eckert was slain and a few others. The idea was to eliminate this place for illicit sex, to take it off the map, and to do what surveillance and arrests could not do, disappear those interested in sex in public from view.
This official move represented a massive change in bathroom governance. The initial public bathrooms were opened to expand the public sphere, to make the city bigger and more accessible to more people. From the 1930s forward, local leaders shifted gears and tried to narrow the public by closing public bathrooms – this happened after segregation broke down, this happened when homelessness came into view, and this is happening now to disappear trans and gender queer people, and this is the action unfolding on page 99 of my book.
Ford Madox Ford was right!
--Marshal Zeringue