The lights you know at the Hollywood Bowl are hidden in the band shell and they illuminate performers.
But the venue is now installing illumination of a kind that will be less visible, although it’ll also perform an important function. The venue has recently installed about 100 red and green lights above toilet stalls to signal whether they are occupied or not.
Allen Klevens, chief executive at the company that made the signals, Tooshlights in Los Angeles, said the lights reduce the discomfort of peeking or knocking during bathroom breaks.
“We want to make people aware that people are having this issue and no one is talking about it,” Klevens said.
The Hollywood Bowl’s non-profit parent, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, first approached Klevens’ business partner, Todd Bermann, a longtime stage manager at the venue. The association was hoping to solve the problem of bathroom congestion. Bermann then brought the project to Klevens, who had recently sold his background music company.
The idea for bathroom lights was partly inspired by similar lights at the Westfield Century City mall that tell people where there are open parking spaces.
Klevens and Bermann invested their own money to develop the technology, which uses sensors to identify whether a person is present in a stall and triggers a red or green light accordingly.
The Hollywood Bowl was the company’s first client and installed about 100 of the lights in one of its huge bathrooms. Venues pay Tooshlights between $600 and $800 per stall.
That might sound steep, but Klevens said it amounts to a speck in a stadium renovation budget, which can run up to tens of millions of dollars.
He said investors see the potential for the idea to spread to new venues. Tooshlights has been able to attract about $1 million from private individuals for growth capital.
Tooshlights might also move beyond simple occupied lights, he said, and will consider creating custom bathroom signals for sports teams or to illuminate entire stall doors at a nightclub for special effects customized to fit the theme of the establishment.
“It’s not just ‘Here’s a light, see you later,’” he said.
– Jonathan Polakoff