NATIONAL PARK SERVICE Park and Recreation Structures

ONLY RARELY are all cabins in a park area individually equipped with toilet, shower, and laundry facilities. More frequently cabins are less pretentious, and groups of such, as well as all public campgrounds, must be furnished with community toilets, showers, and laundries. Wherever, for one or another reason, pit privies rather than flush toilets must serve, shower and laundry facilities should be housed in a separate building. Where flush toilets can be provided, all the needed facilities may be accumulated in one structure scarcely different from the park comfort station save for the addition of shower and laundry rooms.

Because the park comfort station has been already discussed and illustrated, concern here is primarily with shower and laundry facilities for overnight visitors. Although toilet facilities are a part of some of the subjects illustrated, these are considered only incidental to the subject in hand.

Unlike the hot shower and laundry building in organized camps for one sex only, this building in the public campground or cabin colony must have separate shower rooms for men and women. It is not necessary to build the men's showers with individual enclosures and private dressing booths, but it is best, in the women's section, to provide enclosures and dressing rooms with curtained fronts for some of the showers. Although the trend in providing showers for age groups of younger women is probably toward gang showers, such an arrangement for women of all ages, including children, too, does not meet with general approval.

A ratio of one shower to every 12 or 15 persons is reasonable; the same ratio applies to lavatories in the dressing rooms. Windows, giving abundant ventilation and daylight, and electric lighting after dark, wherever electricity is available, are recommended in the shower and dressing rooms, and in the laundry. A careful spotting of the electric outlets, so that all laundry operations are properly lighted, is especially important. In the splash and humidity normal to all the rooms under discussion, smooth and impervious surfaces that are easily kept clean are very desirable. Curbs about six inches high should be built at openings between private dressing rooms and shower stalls and between general dressing rooms and shower rooms. Wood, with its tendency to absorb and retain moisture, swell, and eventually rot out, is to be avoided.

In the laundry, removable mats of wood slats, to keep the campers' feet off the wet floors, will add to comfort. Hot water requirements will mean a large tank and heater, which can be advantageously placed in the laundry room if there are flatirons to be heated. Otherwise, a separate room for heater, tank, and fuel is better, for it will keep much dirt out of the laundry itself.

The average campground laundry will not have all the mechanical equipment the day and age can offer, because of the costs involved and because most campers' laundering is of limited amount. Plentiful hot water, enough two-part laundry trays, ironing boards, and outlets for electric irons or, if electricity is lacking, a stove for heating the old-fashioned kind, will meet the needs of most vacationists. Washing machines, mangles, and driers are not overlooked or here cried down, but these belong to an economy of efficiency rather than the economy of simplicity which largely governs outdoor vacationing.

The vacation season is usually favorable to the drying of clothes out-of-doors. A clearing with clotheslines in orderly alignment should be adjacent to the laundry building. It is fortunate if views of this drying yard can be screened by woods growth. Otherwise, an enclosing fence of vine-covered lattice can be erected to screen sights that might quickly disrupt a housewife's vacation mood.

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