When I was a kid growing up in suburbia, I participated in youth sports. After one disastrous season in soccer, I spent the rest of my childhood summers playing BobbySox Softball. I remember the year my team came in first, the year my team was last, the year my friend took a foul tip off my bat into her eye socket, the years I made All-Stars and the years I didn't, and the year I had a crush on the head umpire. I was primarily a catcher, and my hormone-addled adolescent mind concocted all sorts of highly improbable (and extremely inappropriate) scenarios every time that hunky ump took a knee behind me.

I remember all that. But I also vividly remember the bathrooms at the field: there were no doors on the stalls.

The building was of plain square brick construction; the six-foot stalls were simply masoned in right along with the walls, and the whole thing was unfinished inside. It made for a durable, no-frills, very washable interior. All of the fixtures were fashioned out of stainless steel. As I recall, there weren't even any seats on the toilets.

But there were also no doors. Going to the bathroom in teams of two became de rigeur: one girl would attend to business in the stall while the other would become a human "door" to alert other bathroomers that the stall was occupied. That worked all right for ten-to-fifteen-year-old girls (and I presume the boys had a similar M.O.), but it caused no little consternation amongst the attendant adult sports fans.

It seems that things are rough all over. In the city of San Clemente, California (home of the fantastic Ocean Festival [1]), the city parks commissioners have asked city staff to look into putting doors on the public commodes that don't have them [2].

It seems that back in the 70's, numerous new facilities built in the area were constructed sans doors to curb "inappropriate behavior." In some parks -- like Mira Costa, Linda Lane, and Verde Park -- the decision was made to not even build a restroom. When the city later resumed including restrooms in new parks, the decision then was to make them as condensed as possible, to discourage congregating.

These days, city planners are finally concerned about restroom privacy -- particularly for users of Courtney's Sand Castle, a playground that'll be built this year for children with disabilities together with other kids. And San Clemente isn't alone in a dilemma over what to do about restroom privacy -- many communities eliminated toilet stall doors over the years.

Now that times have changed, cities are taking different approaches. Laguna Beach, for instance, has used what they call courtesy doors, which only cover the lower portion of your body. One San Clemente city park planner said a restroom at Hole in the Fence (a state beach in Capistrano Beach) has individual unisex toilet stalls that could serve as a model for a new restroom his city intends to build at San Gorgonio Park. In a traditional restroom building, which puts stalls inside separate men's and women's rooms, a tremendous amount of space gets wasted. The unisex concept is a simple building with a succession of doors accessible from the outside. A person of either sex can pick any one that's available, go inside, and close the door to use the toilet.

San Clemente city staff agreed at a recent commission meeting to look at each existing restroom in their system, estimate what privacy would cost, and report back. If a restroom looks easy to retrofit, staff may just go ahead and do it, despite concerns that a "closed-door policy" might encourage illicit behavior.

I don't want my kids growing up with bad memories of park bathrooms. At the same time, I don't want "illicit behavior" going on in there, either. What's more important to you: Personal privacy? Or a perception of preventing profligacy?