Chamber pots for NY couple paying $300 rent?

Are chamber pots making a comeback? One site says a couple living in Brooklyn's somewhat upscale Park Slope neighborhood have been using chamber pots instead of a toilet.

This seems too ridiculous to be true -- and in fact it seems likely that the posting is a parody. But according to The Hairpin website, Marcela and Ryan Marshall pay just $300 a month in rent for an apartment that doesn't have a bathroom.

The couple is trying to make the best of it, finding pots from an artist who glazed them with sea glass. They started out sharing one, but quickly found that it didn't work out very well.

"It's not necessarily for the squeamish, but we've been doing it for three years now, and it's helped us feel closer to the building, to its history, and to each other," Ryan Marshall told the site.

They empty the chamber pots into the gutter in the early morning, they said, and then rinse the pots with water.

The posting on Hairpin fooled even some of its regular readers. It got picked up by the Daily Mail, and then it went viral on Twitter.

Would you do the same for $300 a month in rent, especially to live in New York? "Never! Not in a million years!" said one commenter on the Daily Mail's report on the issue.

Others were more sympathetic. "As a born and bred New Yorker, I believe this is extreme but people do make some huge sacrifices to live here, especially Manhattan," said another.

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