In our experience, the restrooms found in city parks are often the stuff of Dickensian nightmares—dark, wet, filled with stray cats, etc. Getting locked in such a place, however, is what happens when a Dickensian nightmare has a one night stand with a Kafkaesque nightmare, producing a horrifying subspecies of terror called Dickaftkaesque nightmare. These, for the record, are precisely the types of fevered hallucinations a person starts having after being locked in a public restroom. Probably. We wouldn't know. Yet.
According to A Walk in the Park, yesterday marked the second time a person found themselves trapped in the closet bathroom in just three weeks. The most recent incident involved the fire department being called to free an unidentified victim from inside the bathroom in the Bronx's Hilton White Playground, and only weeks prior, a 40-year-old man was found "shivering" in a park in Jamaica, Queens, having been locked inside the foul comfort station overnight. The man was reportedly suffering from "early hypothermia" when park employees discovered him.
Geoffrey Croft, who helms the organization NYC Park Advocates, blames inadequately trained employees for the bathroom blunders. "Clearly the Parks Department employees that are doing this are not being thorough enough," he said. "How much effort does it take to say, 'Hello, is anybody here?'"
A park source told Croft that the agency is primarily staffed with "job-training participants" operating without supervision. "Can you imagine how scary it is being locked inside that tiny space?" the source told Croft, adding, ominously, that "this happens a lot more than people know." We can't speak for anyone else, but we'd take a citation for peeing in public over freezing to death alone in a bathroom any day.
