The Curious Case of the Missing Ladies Toilet Room

The Casa Grande Hotel was built in Elk City, Oklahoma in 1928. Its four stories (plus a partial basement) contain 60 guest rooms, a lobby, a banquet room, and a coffee shop, and was in operation until 1968. Apart from a museum, which occupied the lobby and coffee shop in the 1990s, the hotel has been vacant since its closure and is remarkably unaltered. A 2023 survey of the building revealed one curious omission: while there is a large multi-fixture men’s toilet room that served guests attending functions in the banquet room and dining in the coffee shop, there is no surviving comparable women’s toilet room anywhere on the premises. Furthermore, there is no evidence to indicate where one may have been located within the building. Yet surely there must have been one. Women dined in the coffee shop and attended dances and other functions in numbers that must have been equivalent to the men. The solution to this mystery takes an unexpected turn and reveals the dangers of applying 21st-century thinking, with its associated standards and assumptions, to a building designed and built nearly 100 years ago.
Presented by architect Mike Kertok this session was part of “Perspectives in History”: The Oklahoma History Symposium, held on May 4, 2024, at the Oklahoma History Center.