Unfortunately, I've made other plans so I won't be able to attend the Old Town Bar's Monday night 100th anniversary celebration of its Hinsdale Urinals. But I dropped by the bar Tuesday afternoon to assure manager and co-owner Gerard Meagher that it was nothing personal. I've been patronizing the bar, at 45 E. 18th St., for years and have come to feel a close personal relationship with those stand-up porcelain fellows, so richly deserving of the credit they'll be receiving.

Old Town Bar's manager, Gerard Meagher, sees the 100-year-old urinals as important to the bar's character. Mark Ovaska for The Wall Street Journal

According to Mr. Meagher, the festivities will include a Champagne toast, a tribute by writer Steve Rushin and the reading of a congratulatory letter from Mayor Bloomberg.

Selecting Nov. 1, 2010, to throw the party wasn't some sort of arbitrary decision, a bald-faced strategy to gin up bar sales. In fact, it's etched in stone, or rather baked into the porcelain, right there at the top of the urinal—Nov. 1, 1910. Mr. Meagher took me into the men's room to show me. "Everybody is always complimenting us on the urinals," he said.

I have strong feelings about urinals, as I suspect most men do, going so far as to prefer a stall should one become available at my moment of urgency. I wondered aloud whether that might be a middle-age thing.

"As you get older you get a little shy," acknowledged Mr. Meagher, 58. "Especially if somebody is behind you. You're in a pressure situation."

Actually, I don't think it's endemic to middle age. I've been having problems peeing in public since my 20s. I remember one time at a Grateful Dead concert—it might have been at the Meadowlands—where the men's-room line at intermission was 10 deep. Just as I was about to cozy up to the urinal some wiseguy in back shouts, "Pressure!" Needless to say, I couldn't perform.

But the beauty, the greatness, the glory—Mr. Meagher employed the word "majestic" to describe these mute but far from personality-free bar workers—of Old Town's urinals is that they're almost as commodious as a stall. "You've got a little privacy," he observed. "A broad-shouldered fellow can fit in there without shadowing everyone else."

The notion of "fitting" inside a urinal may not appeal to everyone. But that's a pretty fair description of the experience. These big boys are so spacious and tall, and with shoulders that extend almost behind you and certainly far enough that no one can look over and make unfair judgments, that one might go so far as to describe the experience of relieving yourself as enveloping, even nurturing. And perhaps most important of all—certainly for the quality of life of subsequent bar patrons—the margin of error is huge. You basically can't miss.

Mr. Meagher, it goes without saying, is a generous soul; it takes a big guy to throw a party for a latrine. And that generosity extends so far as to acknowledge his competitors. Indeed, he's something of a urinal connoisseur.

"There are some great urinals in New York," he said. "I know P.J. Clarke has some great ones. They're pretty majestic as well. And McSorley's has huge urinals. I've always noticed really big urinals."

He described some of those at Fordham, where he attended college, as "masterpieces of the urinal."

Old Town, established in 1892, actually predates its Hinsdale Urinals; Mr. Meagher doesn't know what customers did for relief before then. His father, Larry, who died a couple of years ago, went to work there as a manager in the 1970s and eventually took over the place. In a sense, the urinals, as much as the bar's 55-foot mahogany and marble bar and 16-foot tin ceilings, are symbolic of the Old Town's everyman charm.

It's seen its share of celebrities—Liam Neeson courted Natasha Richardson here, and has returned with Julia Roberts and Ralph Fiennes, according to Mr. Meagher—but fawning "is not part of our menu," Mr. Meagher said. Indeed, his father at first rejected "Late Night with David Letterman " when the show wanted to shoot the bar's neon sign for its opening sequence—for free.

"They said, 'Others are offering it for nothing,'" his son remembered. "He said, 'Go to the other places.' We got our price and 10 years of exposure."

Which isn't to suggest that Old Town is set in its ways, that time stands still there. "In the old days we used to put ice in the urinals," Mr. Meagher said. "It was kind of a game for people to melt the ice, but that's sort of fallen out of favor. I guess it's just lazy."

He was referring to why the bar no longer chooses to stock the urinals with ice, not suggesting that men have lost interest in taking aim, an atavistic and timeless impulse. He added that the bar doesn't employ those scented urinal pucks, describing them as "worse than the condition they're designed to address."

Monday night's festivities, which are open to the public, will also include a urinals "viewing opportunity" for the ladies. Female customers "now and then" express interest in seeing the Hinsdales, according to Mr. Meagher.

"What are you talking, 'Now and then'?" sniffed Chip Sylvester, the Old Town's bartender. "All the time."

Mr. Meagher insisted the Old Town has always, and certainly will Monday night, police the process. "At the appropriate time," he said, "we let them peer in."