After a distressing hunt for a public restroom, a woman shared her findings. 2 years later, she's a bathroom influencer with a thriving online community.

• New Yorker Teddy Siegel was desperate to use a toilet but struggled to find a public restroom.
• She started documenting locally available toilets on TikTok to help residents and tourists.
• Her idea transformed into a community working to improve restroom access throughout the city.

In August 2021, New Yorker Teddy Siegel, who is now 24 years old, posted a TikTok that showed a Google map of the city, which zoomed in to highlight the location of a Taco Bell, next to a comment that gave the details of a public bathroom in the venue, including what floor it was on, and the code to get inside.

The upload received 1.1 million views, and over 1,100 comments packed with further recommendations of local public restrooms and how to get inside.

The video was part of a series Siegel had started a month prior after she'd found herself desperate to use a public bathroom in the city with no relief in sight. Following the ordeal she decided to share the location of an accessible toilet on TikTok, on the off-chance it could help someone else in need.

Two years on, she's become a thriving public bathroom influencer with 153,000 followers on her TikTok account @got2gonyc, and a campaigner fighting for the right to sanitary toilet access.

Siegel never expected to go viral posting about restrooms

In June 2021, Siegel was shopping in Times Square with her sister and really needed to use the bathroom. She asked a store worker if she could use theirs, but was told it was for employees only. She tried a few more stores and they all turned her away, Siegel told Insider, so she darted to a nearby McDonald's instead.

"At this point, like, I really had to go and I was almost in tears," Siegel said, but an employee at the fast-food chain told her only customers could be given a code to the toilet.

"I quickly bought a water bottle and then ran upstairs and used the bathroom and made it in time thankfully, but I just was really annoyed," she said.

It turned out the door was unlocked so Siegel could have gone in anyway, but the whole incident frustrated her, and she wished there was some sort of service that could have saved her the hassle of running around in full-bladder panic in search of a usable restroom.

Siegel filmed the exterior of the McDonald's, planning to start a private list of public bathrooms she could use in the future to avoid the same situation, but her sister encouraged her to share it online too, as there may be others who would benefit from the same information.

She created the TikTok account and posted her first video with information about the McDonald's, which received 16,000 views and a handful of comments that shared more recommendations of local bathrooms and how to get inside, and Siegel realized she may be on to something.

As Siegel's videos blew up, she launched an interactive map that listed the locations of many more bathrooms

Siegel took the comments from viewers detailing available toilets and used them to create further videos that showed their exact locations on Google Maps. This prompted even more comments, so she made even more videos, steadily growing her follower count as a result.

"I, at a certain point, had too many bathrooms, and I decided to then take all of those suggestions and start a crowdsourced Google Map," Siegel told Insider. "To date that has over 1,500 bathrooms across all five boroughs."

Viewers can add new locations to the map or update older bathrooms if their status or codes have been changed, to ensure the public can still get inside.

Siegel started experimenting with her content, making videos where she challenged herself to see how many stores she had to go to until someone let her use their bathroom, and a rundown of the top public bathrooms to do your make-up in.

She knew public toilet access was important, but saw her TikTok account as a "funny thing that I did" and acknowledged it was pretty "quirky," until she started to receive comments and messages from viewers who expressed how deeply the lack of bathroom access had impacted then, from delivery drivers who worked night shifts and had given up trying to find them, to homeless people.

"That was really a turning point for me in the account," she told Insider. "This really is so much more than a public health crisis. It's also an equity crisis."

The TikTok account helped create more conversation around what is normally a private topic

Siegel started compiling some of the comments and direct messages she had received from viewers and posted a series of often anonymous testimonies to her website which included the experiences of a 44-year-old NYC resident with severe IBS and a construction worker with Crohn's disease who were unable to find a restroom in time.

"After that I started doing more work with Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine and other members of city council and I spoke on the steps of City Hall the following June in support of Intro 258, which was also known as the bathroom bill, which then passed in October which was really exciting," Siegel told Insider.

Intro 258 requires that the Mayor designates an agency or office that would report on the number of operational public bathrooms throughout the city, and "report on feasible locations for public bathroom facilities." New York City ranked 93rd out of the 100 largest US cities when it comes to public bathrooms per capita, according to a press release published in October 2022 by the Manhattan Borough President.

"Once I knew how important it was, it just made me so motivated to not stop until this issue is actually solved," Siegel told Insider. 

In August, New York City council member Sandy Nurse introduced a further bill that aims to improve public bathroom conditions with the goal of providing one toilet per 2,000 residents by 2035.

Siegel said she "could never imagine" speaking to someone so candidly about using the restroom before, but she loves the community that has grown around the topic and how her mission has evolved into "breaking the stigma surrounding bathroom access."

For more stories like this, check out coverage from Insider's Digital Culture team here.