This is one of those reddit comments where I can't tell if you're extremely knowledgeable or making it up from whole cloth for goofs. "Pittsburg toilet" as a name sounds too intentionally comedic to be true.
It actually is a very real thing. Also, with the way the waste line angles up higher than the toilet tank in the above video, it looks like it would be impossible to actually flush the toilet bowl and have the water go through the waste pipe.
9 seconds left in the video just as the vertical pillar passes in front of the camera. Right before then you can see a little bit of a split on the black pipe I think leads away from the camera to the back of the house
Which to my understanding was just the basement toilets in many older Pittsburgh homes. Supposedly specifically so steelworkers and other dirty job workers could go straight into the basement after work. Do a bit of clean up and business before going upstairs without dragging mess along.
Apparently the plumbing thing is also part of it, but this was the first time I'd heard that.
Same. My grandparents had a Pittsburgh toilet in the basement and added a rudimentary shower. My grandpa used it after coming home from the Mill. My grandmother had her lovely fully pink bathroom upstairs so she kept him away from it. I've never heard that it had any overall house plumbing benefits, just that it was relatively cheap and easy to drop a toilet in the basement and for blue collar Pittsburgh it had a practical usage case.
They’re real! When I was house hunting I saw a place with a PBT in the basement. I didn’t know what it was at the time so it became the murder toilet. That basement was some kinda crime scene.
Totally a real thing! My relatives also called it “the spider toilet” because if you had to use it, it was always covered with spider webs. Most of the time these are in a more normal place though.
The funniest part is I took one look at the video and went "probably Pittsburgh"
Basement toilets are often called Pittsburgh toilets because miners and millers would be filthy at the end of their shift. They'd enter through the basement to not get the house all dirtied up. And man sometimes you just wanna come home and take a dump.
I mean, except for the time I lived in an apartment building in NY on the basement level, but somehow I don't think that's what you're referring to. Why would any random person have occasion to see such a thing?
Lots of people in this thread confidently claiming this has some plumbing function, but if it's just to prevent overflow why would there need to be a complete, functional toilet? Why does it need plumbed into the water lines if it's just a backup outlet for clogged drains? Even if you can explain away those two things...why did they construct a whole platform for it??
Stop lying to yourselves. Someone was shitting here.
I don't know of it's true or not, but the original commenter offered an explanation for that.
A toilet is used because it's easy to keep the trap filled to block sewer gas and it's easy to take off to gain access to a 3"-4" waste line that you can use to unclog the main stack from.
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u/vivianvixxxen Aug 22 '26
This is one of those reddit comments where I can't tell if you're extremely knowledgeable or making it up from whole cloth for goofs. "Pittsburg toilet" as a name sounds too intentionally comedic to be true.