When I was a small child in the 1950s, we stayed in the cottage where I was born. They had an outside toilet which was a borehole with a wooden seat with two holes. You might have thought that this would allow for two people to sit side-by-side but in fact, one of the holes was child size and allowed for adults and children to use the facility safely.
Walking Tall - The movie from 1973 based on the story of Sheriff Buford Pusser -there is a scene where the sheriff teaches a lesson to the judge who leaked his warrants and plans for raids. The Sheriff has the authority to assign offices, and he moves the judge’s desk into the men’s room - which features a row of toilets with no dividers.
Similarly, Toronto Star columnist Gary Lautens recounts his wife’s story when they visited Moscow in the 1970’s. She went into a public washroom and it was a row of toilets without dividers. All the women were staring at her, she said, it was embarrassing - they wanted to see what western women’s underwear looked like. Gary says “why didn’t you leave?” She replies “What, and miss the chance to see what communist underwear looked like?”
The washrooms like mentioned in the complaints in earlier posts also have the feature that the toilet is typically visible from the open door, there is no room in the layout for a privacy shield of any sort - meaning the person doing their business is visible to any walking by if the door is opened. Multi-user washrooms typically have some shield to prevent this. While two guys may be going side by side, even in the good old days it was not typically a public production I would think. Toilets used to be typically small closets or alcoves.
My first National Guard Armory was built in the 1920’s. The enlisted bathroom was just six toilets, about 3 feet away from each other, and no stalls of any kind. There were six urinals on the opposite wall. The no stalls was actually convenient, because there was usually only 1 or 2 rolls of toilet paper, so no walls made it easier to pass them back and forth. 
Stalls were finally added sometime in the 90’s, when the unit was reorganized into one that allowed women. Before the stalls, using it took some getting used to. Some people stare straight ahead, and pretend they’re alone in the room, others make a social event out of it. I started as one of the first, and ended as one of the latter.
When people talk about not wanting to use sketchy bathrooms, I usually tell them that thanks to my Army training, I could poop on the side of I-95, waving at cars going by, and it wouldn’t faze me a bit.
The two are actually directly connected. Why do guys feel uncomfortable using the urinal with another guy taking a dump right there? Why do guys feel uncomfortable using the toilet with anther guys also using one, in the open? Same question, really. * How and when did we become squeamish about this?
*
However, guys dont feel uncomfortable peeing next to another guy. Well, yes,* some* do. But in general the Op asks a valid question.
Moderating
That we’re [meaning people in the US] squeamish now is not really part of the OP. We know that. Aside from Broomstick, people are mostly just offering anecdotes about their personal experiences. As it is, this thread is most suited for IMHO. Some actual factual information is going to be necessary for it stay in GQ. If you wish to tell us about your personal bathroom habits you can start a new thread in IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
To be honest, Broomstick pretty much covered it. Privacy of any sort is a relatively recent development. I think Burke would contend that it all changed with the invention of the chimney. That enabled the upper classes to move to the second floor, away from the riff-raff.
During the 1960s, I attended, and then was a counselor at, a summer camp for boys in tidewater Virginia. The bathroom facility consisted of a row of five toilets, side by side, on one side of the room. And on the other, just a few feet away, a long trough to pee into.
No dividers at all. Once inside this small building, everything was in plain sight of everything else. I didn’t think anything of it then. I’ve gotten used to having much more privacy since.
Plus, until recently indoor plumbing was a rarity. Running water, and water as a utility to most (rich) houses, IIRC, is about a 1800’s invention. I knew people who didn’t get running water and plumbing in their farmhouse until around the late 50’s or early 60’s in Canada. Without running water, no flush toilets. You had the choice of a chamber pot or outhouse. (In the WC Fields movie the Dentist, he accidentally kicks a pot that had been under the bed - obviously in the days before the Hayes Code. ) Another side note - were chamber pots for 1 and 2 or just 1? I think some had a lid to help cover the smell, which would be handy either case. hence the expression, “don’t have a pot to piss in” meaning you had to go outdoors even in winter.
Perhaps that’s where the tendency evolved - presumably most outhouses for private homes were one-holers, coupled with the American puritanism or Victorian prudishness about all things sexual/biological such as baring the nether regions in public. They’d be enclosed thanks to weather and keeping out the bigger critters; you wouldn’t want your refuge occupied by a bear that couldn’t find the woods.
Someday I’ll have to take the NYC Tenement Museum tour and see what they did for waste elimination in crowded cities before running water… or were those built after running water? I recall in the less upscale areas of London you could still see where water and sewer pipes were run up the outside of the building and through the wall to retrofit plumbing in 1800’s buildings. Those slum-like row houses in British cities had an outhouse in the tiny yard out back.
Old castles often had a few holes overhanging the walls. (Privy or garderobe). You dumped, so to speak, into the moat. In some cases they built a chimney affair to hide the skid marks down the walls; famously, one castle was taken by invaders when a few brave souls did the chimney climb one night to open the gates.
Royalty as I recall from tours of palaces had absolutely no privacy. they did their business, often in an open chair in the room near the bedroom, and a servant took out the bucket. There’s a scene in the Madness of King George where the one doctor is complaining nobody’s paying attention to George’s blue pee, while the other quacks ooh and ah over his perfectly fine stools in a pot. Those giant empty galleries in Versailles were before the revolution filled with two stories of wooden construction apartments to house the thousands of courtiers and servants, and the complaint was that people would pee and even shit in the corners and stairwells - whether they felt the need to be private or just hid because they were being filthy pigs, who knows?
It seems clear to me that the intent is to crowd a urinal into a wheel-chair-accessable space. So that the space that is “wasted” around an accessable toilet is double-purposed.
When I was 9 I was using a 3-hole deep-drop toilet. And from what I’ve seen on TV, that was always a common thing, and still is where people are doing that at home.
In a national park, they’ll drill a hole an place a toiled over it, If it fills up, they’ll dig another hole. but when you are digging it out yourelf, you just dig a bigger hole, and put more seats it. It just means that you have conversations instead of reading or watching your iPad.
In Melbourne, we had a building tradition that in a private home toilets were in a tiny room with a door, like a toilet stall, with at least one other door between the toilet and the living area. It derived from ba tradition where the toilet was somewhere out the back. but in Arizona, the toilet was placed in the bathroom, and I wasn’t brought up with any particular expectation of privacy.
Both, in practice. At least in the cities where building a latrine would be difficult to impossible (there is a still a problem with installing toilets in some slums in some parts of the world - National Geographic did an article fairly recently about toilets, including showing the wide range of toilet facilities ranging from “taking a crap in an open field in full view of the neighbors” through various latrines and outhouses up to modern-tech stuff that could be found in in Europe, the US, or Japan). Out in the rural areas they might have been used mostly for pee and some other arrangement for poop most of the time, but in inclement weather it’s a heck of a lot more appealing to pee and crap in a bucket than to go outside. And the outside facility, even in places like Europe or China or Japan and other early civilized places could still be just an open field - hole-in-the-ground latrines aren’t even universal today.
It should be noted, however, that “stale” urine - that is, the aged stuff that has turned partially into ammonia - used to be a common de-greaser and cleaner in Ye Olde Days. In Ancient Rome various craftsmen types who needed this stuff for industrial purposes would, essentially, set up public pissoirs outside their workshops, providing a place for men (at least) to unload their bladders and a source of raw material for the workshops. So for those purposes yes, pee and poop would be kept separate. Likewise, in a frontier type household folks would reserve at least some pee for such purposes although, like I alluded to, if there’s a blizzard raging outside the door not freezing to death while taking a crap might take precedence over making more cleaner for getting sheep bits out of raw wool.
And for the sick, the chamber pot probably also doubled as a puke bucket as well, just as modern flush toilets are also used for that purpose.
See prior post about two-holers with different sized holes - you really did not want your young children falling into the cesspit. Even before knowledge about bacteria and disease in bodily waste, it was known that concentrations of either human or animal shit in confined spaces can lead to build up of toxic gases, potentially dense enough to cause unconsciousness (in which case you risk drowning in raw sewage) or even death (for really big cesspits).
Between the in-laws that still lived up in the mountains/down in the holler and some extensive backpacking/camping in my youth, I’ve a few stories regarding wildlife and latrines, including a possum dumped down a vent-hole as prank (in-laws) and a young woman who discovered wasps had built a nest underneath the sitting-hole in a seldom used campsite latrine the hard way. Nobody likes getting pissed on, including (or especially) wasps. We regressed not quite to crapping in an open field by doing so behind the shrubbery which was not quite as thick and luxuriant as we would have liked for privacy, but had the advantage of not being occupied by anything that could harm us while our underwear was down around our ankles.
Both.
There are some very, very ancient sites that show no signs of plumbing or latrines (Çatal Hüyük, for example - apparently bodily waste was carried to middens outside the settlement along with other garbage) and others had flushing toilets of a sort from a very early period (Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley around 2500 BC). Prior to the 19th Century, though, a sanitation system required a nearby river which was, basically, diverted in part or in whole to create a flushing mechanism. Settlements without such water to spare did not have running water although some cities during a heavy rainstorm might have “running sewage” as the rain turned the crap in the streets into a flowing liquid. Other cities would dig cesspits. Really, sanitary arrangements from the dawn of history to present have ranged widely from “none at all” to “amazingly effective”.
Or there was a lack of bathroom facilities in the place but when ya gotta go ya gotta go.
Children, or… 
Once one realizes that the ancient Romans wiped their anus with a sponge on a stick, which was cleaned by washing it in a bucket of water and salt or vinegar, then it makes sense why they all defecated together in one space, as walls would get in the way when they were passing it around.
The most disturbing part of that link was the bit talking about gladiator who used one to commit suicide… :eek:
I’ve only seen one BART men’s room since 2001, but I don’t remember any of them being like this. Mostly they were single person bathrooms with just a toilet and a lock. I think they didn’t want more than one man in there at a time.
Gives a whole new meaning to “dropping the kids off at the pool,” doesn’t it?
My high school was built circa 1970 and the toilets in the boys locker-room did have dividers, but no doors. Thankfully the stalls in the other restrooms did have doors.
Buckingham Palace was short on toilets will into the 20th century, and as late as the 1920s debutantes being presented at court who needed to the facilities has to resort to a chamber pot behind a curtain.
This makes me think of a Chinese movie (made in 2006, set in the 1950s) that features a boarding school where the “bathroom” is a long room with a water-filled trench running down either side. (Screencaps from three different scenes.) Those type toilets are still in use in some places.
Royalty had no privacy? They had as much as they could afford, didn’t they? If they didn’t make it happen then privacy just wasn’t a value to anyone.