Bathrooms gone haywire

NIAGARA UNIVERSITY, N.Y. – Niagara University, as many schools do, has such a beautiful and welcoming campus community. There is an abundance of nature life surrounding our campus as well as the Niagara Gorge across the street. Having Niagara Falls ten minutes away from campus adds to the uniqueness and beauty of it too. With all that Niagara has to offer, it seems as though there can’t possibly be anything wrong with it. Contrary to popular belief, there is. That would be the uncleanliness and dysfunctionality of the campus bathrooms.

This isn’t to say that every single bathroom on Niagara’s campus has an issue (or five), but majority of the bathrooms do lack a lot of attention. Particularly the dorm hall bathrooms, more specifically in Clet and in O’Shea.

As a sophomore resident on campus, I’ve encountered issues in O’Shea. O’Shea and Seton are really the only freshmen dorms on campus. Although you’d think they’d have similar qualities, they do not. The showers in O’Shea provide a “privacy” curtain where you can get changed and then get into the shower itself whereas in Seton, you get a stall with a door and then you get a shower with a curtain. I had many problems last year in O’Shea where I would be fearful that someone would open my shower curtain as a joke or take my things since I didn’t have that safety and security that Seton provides in their bathrooms.

Moving onto my wonderful experiences in Clet, there’s a lot more than O’Shea by the way. If I thought having two curtains in O’Shea was bad, I was in for a rude awakening. In Clet, there are two different bathrooms on each floor. One bathroom has a couple showers with two curtains (like O’Shea), and then the other bathroom has three showers with only one curtain and two private bathrooms. Now, not only does having only one shower curtain make you feel like you’re on “Naked and Afraid,” it provides no privacy whatsoever. The only thing separating people from being near you is that one dainty, folded, and sometimes ripped, shower curtain.

Not only is that an issue, but more often than not, you need to have the skills to take a five minute shower. Why you ask? Well for starters, you can usually only get a few solid minutes of hot water before it turns ice cold. But if you’re lucky, your shower drain might also be clogged so that you’re standing in a bath of water, trying to rinse your body before the water overflows all over the floor. Stepping out of the shower in my crocs leaves the bathroom floor soaking wet, bringing me back old memories of my Splash Lagoon family vacation.

“What about the private bathrooms?” I’m so glad you asked. Yes they provide more privacy, but they still have maintenance issues. One of the private bathrooms has a clogged drain, thus leaving you standing in a tub full of water like the shower in the same bathroom with only one curtain. Along with that, it sometimes takes the showers up to ten minutes to heat up. That is not an exaggeration. On top of all of that, there’s no drain on the floor of the bathroom. Again, causing you to step out with wet shoes leaving water everywhere and having nowhere for it to go.

Niagara University as a whole is a wonderful campus filled with friendly faces, a great academic atmosphere, and many great opportunities. It is a thriving community with hardworking faculty, staff and students. There isn’t anything about this campus that I would change, besides a few of the bathrooms.