Smack dab in the middle of the Hoover Dam (see shot below) sits an elegant art deco men’s room. Our bathroom at home should only look so good. Well, maybe I won’t go there—but a single full bath in a house with four kids is sometimes not a pretty picture.

Anyhow, this bathroom as I said is about midway across the dam. So apparently if you use it you are peeing over thousands of vertical feet of reinforced cement—or over the stored waters of the Colorado River, depending on the angle.

The men’s room itself is a duplex affair. You walk into a vestibule, which is shown here, then ascend a curved stair to the business end of the bathroom. Coming back down the stairs I noticed a shaft of blue light coming in through the open door, nicely balanced by the yellowish light coming from a frosted window behind me, and voilà!

In the shot below, there’s a lot going on in this vertiginous fisheye view of Hoover Dam from the new bridge that bypasses the dam (the men’s room is in one of the fins that you can barely see), so you may need to check the photo out in a larger size: