What is the Pittsburg Potty Doing in Milwaukee?

Twenty three years of showing homes on Milwaukee's North Shore have taught me to expect the unexpected in a basement. Coal chutes. Cisterns. A fruit cellar the size of a walk in closet. A fireplace nobody has lit since Truman.

But nothing stops a first time buyer in their tracks quite like the sight of a single toilet, sitting in the open, in the middle of the basement floor. No walls. No door. No sink. Just a lone commode, facing the furnace like it is waiting for a bus that stopped running in 1931.

If you own a Wauwatosa bungalow, a Milwaukee East Side Colonial, a Shorewood four square or one of the older homes in Whitefish Bay, you may have one. And if you have ever wondered what on earth it is doing there, you are in good company. Historians, plumbers and at least one NPR station have tried to get to the bottom of it

Here is what we know, what we think we know, and what makes a very good story.

Milwaukee did not invent this. The lone basement toilet is common enough across the industrial Northeast and Midwest that it earned a nickname: the Pittsburgh Potty. Western Pennsylvania has so many of them that a local photographer set out to document every one he could find, and Pittsburgh's public radio station, 90.5 WESA, has covered the subject more than once. Wisconsin Public Radio found examples in Milwaukee, Madison, La Crosse and Mount Horeb. They turn up in Illinois, Minnesota, Indiana, New Jersey and the New York suburbs too.

So the good news for Milwaukee homeowners is that your basement is not weird. It is regionally appropriate.

This is the story you asked about, and it is the one I hear most often at showings. The idea goes that turn of the century builders installed a toilet in the basement early in construction so the crew had somewhere to go while framing the rest of the house, and then simply left it behind when the job was done.

It is a charming theory. It is also, as far as I can tell, undocumented. None of the architects, professors or plumbers who have looked into this cite it. Construction crews in 1910 were far more likely to use an outhouse on site than to plumb a permanent fixture for their own convenience, and a toilet requires the sewer lateral to already be connected, which typically happened late in the build.

That said, I have absolutely seen tradespeople use them. An OnMilwaukee editor who bought a Riverwest home with one reported that the crew installing his new furnace put the basement toilet to use before the job was over. So the workers did use it. They just were not the reason it was there.

This is the explanation you will hear from realtors, grandparents and most of Pittsburgh. Milwaukee was a city of tanneries, breweries, foundries and machine shops. A man came home covered in whatever he had spent ten hours standing in, entered through the back or side door straight into the basement, cleaned up at the laundry tub, changed his clothes, used the toilet, and only then climbed the stairs to join the family for supper.

Jessie Cannizzaro of Milestone Plumbing, past president of NARI Milwaukee, told OnMilwaukee this is exactly how she was taught to understand them. The lack of a proper sink was not an oversight. The laundry tub or slop sink did double duty, so nobody paid for a redundant fixture. Old shower heads piped directly over the floor drain, with no stall, are part of the same tradition.

There is a wrinkle. Some of the loveliest homes on the East Side with basement toilets were built for the owners of those mills, not the men who worked in them. In those houses, the basement toilet was more likely intended for the hired help, particularly the gardener or handyman who spent the day outdoors and was not about to be invited to use the family's bathroom upstairs.

Now for the version engineers prefer. Architect William J. Martin, who studied at Carnegie Mellon and has been quoted by WESA, TODAY and Mental Floss, argues these toilets were never meant to be used at all. In the era before floor drains were standard, a house needed a lowest point where a sewer backup could surface. A toilet is the largest opening on the line. Put one in the basement, and when the city's overburdened sewers pushed back during a storm, the mess arrived on a concrete floor instead of the parlor rug.

In other words, the Pittsburgh Potty was a sacrificial fixture. A plumbing pressure valve with a seat on it.

Here is where Milwaukee adds its own twist. Cannizzaro pointed out that in our area the floor drain is the lowest fixture and would back up first, so the release valve theory does not fully apply to local homes built after floor drains became common. But for the earliest houses, built before 1925 when the Jones Island treatment plant opened and the region's sewer system matured, it very plausibly did. Milwaukee was also busy earning its reputation for so called sewer socialism in those years, pouring public money into sanitation. The basement toilet may be a small domestic footnote to a very big civic story.

This one comes from Thomas Hubka, professor emeritus at UW Milwaukee's School of Architecture and author of "How the Working-Class Home Became Modern, 1900-1940." His research suggests that for working class families, the three fixture bathroom we take for granted did not arrive all at once. A toilet, a sink and a tub often showed up in different rooms, on different floors, years apart.

For many modest Milwaukee homes, Hubka found that the basement toilet was simply the first toilet the house ever had. The basement was the cheapest place to run the pipe, early fixtures leaked, and an unfinished room with a drain was the least risky place to experiment with this newfangled indoor plumbing. The upstairs bathroom came later, when the family could afford it. Hubka calls the whole phenomenon a complex, multi factor story, and he cautions that it still needs careful documentation.

That may be the most honest answer. Your basement toilet is probably there for two or three of these reasons at once.

I bring this up for a practical reason. Buyers see the lone toilet and assume something is wrong with the house. It is not. It is a sign that the house is old enough to have a story, and old enough to have been built when Milwaukee was one of the most industrious cities in America.

For sellers, my advice is the same advice I give about every basement: make it spotless. Inspectors spend more than an hour down there, and a clean, well lit basement with clear access to the panel, furnace and water heater tells a buyer the house has been cared for. If the toilet still works, leave it. A working second toilet is a feature, not a flaw, and more than one buyer has walked upstairs and said "we could frame that in." If it does not work, cap it properly and disclose it.

Whatever you do, do not apologize for it. In a market where the best homes sell because of their character, the loneliest seat in the house is part of the charm.

Most likely a combination of reasons: it gave workers a place to clean up before going upstairs, it may have served as the lowest point for sewer backups before floor drains were standard, and in many modest homes it was simply the first toilet the house ever had.

A nickname for a freestanding basement toilet, usually with no walls or sink, common in pre World War II homes across the industrial Northeast and Midwest, including Milwaukee.

It is a popular story, but no historian or plumber who has studied the question cites it, and crews of that era typically used an outhouse on site.

Not if it works. A functional second toilet is an asset. If it does not work, have a plumber cap it correctly and disclose it. Either way, present the basement clean and well lit.

They are common in homes built before about 1940 throughout Milwaukee's East Side, Riverwest, Bay View, Wauwatosa, Shorewood, Whitefish Bay and other established neighborhoods.