Ben Cansdale has been staring at port-a-potties for half an hour. When a home game starts, a crew from Modern Disposal Services in Buffalo is dispatched to do what they call a "half-suck."
The Bills-Colts game is about to start in 30 minutes, and Cansdale is in the driver's seat. Drunk people are pointing and waving at him as he talks. A woman stands in front of a truck trying to get the attention of the driver so she can take a picture.
Cansdale shrugs it off as she laughs and points out that he's a carnival exhibit. He says people treat them like a joke. I take pride in my job. I don't think these people want to see what happens if we're not here.
Cansdale's job isn't great, but sports wouldn't happen without him. The port-a-potty is anunderappreciated hero for most outdoor sporting events in the U.S. The portable bathroom business is growing fast because of the constant need at sporting events. Cansdale is an essential worker at our nation's sports fields.
He doesn't have time to let his pride get in the way. The Modern crew has about 90 minutes to take care of the port-a-potties spread over the public parking lots outside Highmark Stadium.
Cansdale has to replace two rolls of toilet paper from a latched holder, suck out as much as possible from inside the bowl and clean the seat with water and a scrub brush. He has never had to refill his hand sterilant at a Bills game. Cansdale says that nobody is washing their hands. They just want to leave.
The Modern drivers call it a "half-suck" because the goal is to get the stalls usable after the game. They'll do a lot of cleans on Monday.
The half-suck math says that the cleaners will have less than three minutes per toilet, with people streaming in and out of the port-a-potties as they try to do their jobs, all while trying to navigate giant trucks through tiny windows. The weather report states that there will be a wicked Buffalo wind and rain around the time of the game.
There is a light in Cansdale's eyes as he opens the truck door about 10 minutes before the game. "Go time," he says. This is going to be a smelly ride.
The first portable bathroom is thought to have been invented by the ancient Egyptians. It was a wooden stool with a hole in it and a piece of pottery that was found in the tomb.
Over the years, the concept of mobile restrooms evolved slowly, with centuries of civilizations just doing small alterations to the chamber pot. As more and more American jobs moved into large-scale mining and building projects, the need for portable bathrooms rose. A wooden box that was used by miners as their underground bathroom was recently discovered in an abandoned copper mine in northern Michigan. 100 years ago, finding a tree or a wooden box was the best way to find a bathroom for miners and construction workers.
The first formal port-a-potties for World War II ships were built in 1940. The new ships didn't have bathroom facilities, so supervisors were frustrated at the productivity loss from workers leaving to find facilities on shore. The port-a-potties were made with a wooden outer shell and a large metal storage tank.
The concept of port-a-potties spread quickly to construction sites in the coming years. It's impossible to overstate the impact portable bathroom additions have had on society. Laura Walikainen Rouleau, a social sciences professor at Michigan Tech and author of an upcoming book, "Private Spaces in Public Places," says that large public gatherings have become an important part of our society. You couldn't do that without portable facilities in the bathroom.
It's remarkable how little portable bathroom history has been recorded, even though there are brilliant minds devoted to the topic. "That's a reflection of how people view port-a-potties as a whole," says Alison K. Hoagland, author of "The Bathroom: A Social History of Cleanliness and The Body." They're a last-ditch, worst-case scenario moment for most of us. It's a field that has not been studied.
By the 1950s and 1960s, most large events had begun to hire companies to bring in temporary bathrooms for outside stadiums. The need for portable bathrooms was inevitable as the number of people attending college football games increased from 18.9 million in 1950 to almost 30 million in 1970. There are two main things that people always care about when they tailgate, according to UC Irvine professor Tonya Williams Bradford, who has studied and written extensively about tailgating in the U.S. They want a place where their friends will know how to find them. They want port-a-potties to be close, but not too close. They want to be able to make a beeline for them.
Long lines and bad facilities were the norm back then because organizers didn't devote much attention or money. Many events have a goal of having one portable toilet for every 500 attendees. Port-a-potty companies recommend a stall for every 50 people. If alcohol is being served, that number goes down to 1 for every 40 attendees.
Art Spander, who recently retired at the age of 82, has attended more than 40 Super Bowls, 50 Masters, and at least 30 Wimbledons. He's well known for attending the Rose Bowl games for over sixty years in a row, and for having one of the largest collections of portable bathrooms in the world. He's seen the rise of the sports port-a-potty. He says he came to a realization recently that he owes god a thank you for port-a-potties. If we didn't have those things, sports wouldn't have grown the way they have.
The number of port-a-potty facilities went up in the mid-1970s. Spander says there were never enough. People would have to go behind their cars or try to hold it until they got to the stadium. People used to go off to the side of the road to get to games. It was very gross.
There's a good chance that that is a result of sports organizers watching the biggest port-a-potty disaster in human history: 1969's Woodstock. 500,000 people showed up at a farm in upstate New York and had to use 600 toilets, which was an absurd 1 bathroom for every 833 people. One of the most memorable moments in Michael Wadleigh's film, "Woodstock," was when he captured a man named Thomas Taggart cleaning out a row of portable toilets. His happy disposition, contrasted with the chaos and grossness of a half million people in the mud and sewage of Woodstock, became an enduring image.
The Woodstock footage shows how little port-a-potty technology has changed. At a music concert in 1969 and at a Bills home game in 2021, Taggart and Cansdale walked into plastic shells with toilet paper holders on the side. Taggart uses a long hose and tank to suck out a shallow porcelain bowl, which is similar to Cansdale's process. The bowls of 2021, made of plastic, are much larger and can hold about 10 gallons.
"The formula seems to work, and at the toilet conferences I've been to, I don't see port-a-potty innovations coming in the future, either," says University of Illinois architecture professor Kathryn Anthony, who testified in Congress about the need for equality. You just need the basics to get in and out.
The illustration is by Freak City.
Ben Cansdale got his gloves. The Modern crew is supposed to wait until the Bills-Colts game is over, but every second counts when it comes to cleaning portable bathroom.
Cansdale walks around the compartment outside the truck that holds a few dozen rolls of toilet paper. He uses the same assembly line system as many of his teammates, and he scrubs all of them after five straight half-sucks. It's much quicker than if he tried to do each one in one go.
The Bills run onto the field and there is a roar from inside the stadium. Cansdale takes that as his starter's pistol. Cansdale takes off with a mound of toilet paper rolls as a military jet buzzes past the stadium. He made it through the first two stalls, but when he threw open the third door, he found a Bills fan peeing in his pants.
Cansdale smiles and shakes his head as he closes the door. He said on the ride that people have no problem using a toilet during the cleaning process, and that's exactly what happens over and over again for the next hour and a half. Cansdale says that they must go.
Cansdale calls the contents of the port-a-potties the volume. He has a vacuum tube on the trunk that looks like a Ghostbusters gun and a leaf blower. The first blast of air that comes out of the vacuum before it reverses flow is what Cansdale warns about.
It's worse than he said. The warm air is like opening up an oven that has been baking full baby diapers all day. A guy standing nearby gets a whiff and immediately dry heaves and starts jogging the other way.
Cansdale sucks out each toilet for an hour. An empty stall looks a lot more like a kitchen sink than a bottomless pit.
He hangs up the hose at around 1:10 pm, and now it's time for the grand finale: scrounging up any cans and debris, pouring five gallons of water back into the toilet to refill most of it, and giving a quick scrub all around the seat. He fills his truck with salt water when it gets cold.
He throws the beer cans away after grabbing them with his hands. He reached down with his gloves and pulled out someone else's gloves as Cansdale's hose began to get stuck. He fishes out two phones at the top of the stalls.
He drops a small blue dye pack when he walks down the row after finishing the last one. The plastic packs have some anti-perspirant in them, but they are mostly used to color the water so people can't see what's underneath.
Cansdale opens the first door, gives a quick Scan, and then lets the door slam shut behind him. He checks toilet No. 2, 3, and 4. He pulls the door open when he gets to the final one and finds the guy who locked the door before. He heads for the truck on the other side of the parking lot.
Cansdale throws his bucket on the truck and looks over at someone who has seen some s--t. He says "Welcome to the port-a-potty disposal business" as he starts the engine.
The bathroom of tomorrow might look a lot like port-a-potties.
A University of Utah law professor is a founding member of a group of architects, legal experts and advocates who are pushing for more inclusivity in restrooms around the world. Over the past century, many of society's most important conversations about diversity and inclusion have ended up in the bathroom.
We don't have the best track record when it comes to public restrooms. I don't want to make it too radical and say that the bathroom tells the story of a nation. You can tell a lot about a society by how it configured its bathroom.
In the middle of a national conversation about gender, the bathroom has become a focal point. The images of a person in a skirt or a person with pants that signal what a man or woman is are still used in men's and women's restrooms. Our current men's/women's construct limits parents of kids of the opposite sex, as well as caretakers for elderly people of the opposite sex, which is why it isn't age inclusive.
On the website, Kogan and Co. present detailed 3D visuals of what an inclusive bathroom could look like.
A wall should be built to separate a large space from the main traffic flow outside. There is an open area on the other side of the wall for anyone, regardless of gender. In the back, there were rows of closed-off stalls, with no visibility into them, where you would have no idea who was in the bathroom next to you, and it was noisy enough that even sheepish people wouldn't have to worry about the sounds associated.
portable bathrooms are oddly where society may be headed. He says that port-a-potties are a great way to be equal. People seem to get over their fears about who will use the stall next to them, because they're private.
All- gender stalls are similar to the way most rows of port-a-potties make no distinction.
Hammer's Lot is one of the most popular places for Bills Mafia members to meet, and the owner considers it a perk that he only has two stalls for women. He spends $2,500 per season to have six total port-a-potties serviced by Modern Disposal, and he is a roofer with a lifetime of port-a-potty experience.
Hammer barks at lot workers about the bathroom on the day of the Colts game. He wants to make sure there are no men in the women's port-a-potties.
In conversations with more than 20 women outside the Bills stadium, cordoning off restrooms was a unanimous thumbs up. One woman who declined to give her name for a story about port-a-potties said she liked the idea of women having their own toilets. I don't want to hide behind a car, and I don't want to go in a bad place. You have to make sure they're not a mess.
It can be an issue on private lots. Half of the Modern port-a-potties near Bills home games are in private lots, but the drivers can't squeeze their trucks into smaller lots like Hammer's when they're full of cars. On the day of the Colts game, a Hammer's Lot worker declared one out of commission and put two trash cans in front of it. He needed a power washer to clean the barf off the walls, and had to clean that one the next day.
A couple walks up to two stalls holding hands across the street from where port-a-potty maintenance is less of a concern. Near the doors, they release their hands and open their doors, only to look at each other and then turn away in horror.
The guy said no and they left.
Sometimes the cost of holding it isn't as bad as the cost of getting to go.
The illustration is by Freak City.
There is something about portable bathroom that brings out our inner Johnny Knoxville.
The band director for Iowa State was having lunch at Jack Trice Stadium before the game. The band warms up on gamedays and plays the fight song in the tailgating lots. A friend showed Carichner a video of his band as Carichner mowed through a soggy cheeseburger. After hiding near 10 port-a-potties, about 50 members jumped out and started playing the fight song.
The clip shows kids putting their fingers in their ears as perplexed toilet users wander out into the noise of "ISU Fights". The band paid homage to a history of video games and e-characters during its halftime performance. The band members at the port-a-potties are the thing that goes viral. Nobody wants to go into a port-a-potty. Do you think it's a little nicer with some music playing in the background?
There's a subgenre on the internet of people trying to run across the top rows of port-a-potties. The Kentucky Derby is where daring adults attempt a toilet sprint. Fans throwing beer cans at runners fall down on top of the toilets or through the ceilings in many videos. The roofs of port-a-potties are thin and can only hold 100 pounds of pressure before they collapse.
Modern's local headquarters is where Cansdale and other crew members stand around on the day of the Bills-Colts game and talk about port-a-potty shenanigans.
The tipped-over port-a-potty is the beginning of the rundown. "If you tip one over backwards, everything stays down in the bowl," says Dan McKenna, the crew supervisor. If it goes over frontwards.
He doesn't have to finish his sentence. The crew members nod their heads in remembrance of the longest, darkest moments of any port-a-potty cleaner's day.
The whole crew sighs in unison when one of them mentions how at almost every construction site, a clever worker will yell at them, "Hey, is the sh---er clogged?"
Recently, they've had a few instances where people either light port-a-potties on fire or blow them up.
Blow them up?
He gestured for us to follow him, and he walked back between a few dozen port-a-potties surrounding the garage area that had been sucked out but needed a full clean.
A stall that will soon be going to port-a-potty heaven is where McKenna stops. The toilet seat and bowl were blown to pieces by either fireworks or explosives when he approached one with side walls that are still upright. A fluorescent green traffic cone was put at the bottom of the road to serve as a temporary tombstone.
One guy says, "Rest in peace," and everybody laughs.
The entire crew of Modern is on the road back to headquarters five minutes away when the Bills limp into the locker room at halftime trailing the Colts. The five trucks have successfully sucked almost 200 portable toilets.
The volume is emptied into a tanker and then taken to the Buffalo sewage treatment facility. They'll repeat the same thing the next three days, with a full-suck of the private and public lots. Two weeks later, during the Monday Night Football game in which Mac Jones throws only three passes, Cansdale and his crewmates do the suckiest half-suck anyone can remember. The wind was so strong that port-a-potties blew over and were zipping around parking lots like big plastic sailboats, sending terrified Bills fans running. The only way to keep them anchored was to fill the bowls high enough with extra water.
Cansdale is happy when he heads home from a Bills-Patriots game, even if he has to clean out plastic toilets. He'd been making a good wage as an electrician. He has significant bonuses for working Bills games. Veteran teammates talk about him like he's the future of the port-a-potty business: gifted, fast, relentless, unafraid of the challenge.
He and his pregnant girlfriend, Lindsay, had to skip a month's worth of bills to make ends meet before he took this job. He dropped out of the punk-rock band he'd been in for 10 years and desperately tried to find a way to propose to Lindsay without the lights being turned off. Things got really tight after she had their son, Silas. He had to find a new job.
He got 17 responses to his resume on a job-search site. He was asked to become one of the 750 people who take care of Buffalo's trash and portable toilets. He felt a bit embarrassed when he heard about the waste business, but then he heard about the benefits of being a garbageman. He was at Modern Academy, where the company trains the trash collector and port-a-potty half-suckers of tomorrow.
Most people with a commercial driver's license would prefer to do garbage than sewage, according to the hierarchy at Modern Academy. Solid prospects with no real preference, like Cansdale, are often courted for the port-a-potty track. He says he finds no shame in being able to take care of his family. I make good money and have good benefits, and I live stress-free right now. I don't see any shame in that.
He comes home from a long day of running and smelling terrible. He calls Lindsay from outside the house so she can distract him while Cansdale jumps in the shower. When he gets out, he plays with his son for a while before dinner.
Cansdale tries to play his acoustic guitar for a few minutes before they put his son to bed. On the day of Bills-Colts, when he starts strumming an original song, he hears the pitter patter of tiny feet trodding toward him. His son runs into the room and listens to his dad play.
It was a silly tune Cansdale developed during a diaper change. Cansdale loves that it's the last thing he'll do on this day, because he loves that his son loves it the first time he sang it. Cansdale thinks the one-word title is the perfect chorus for the song: Stinkybaby.
