I have a toilet in my basement. Not a bathroom, just a toilet sitting in my corner.
Lots of other Pittsburghers have Pittsburgh potties as well. In the steel industry’s heyday, workers would come home filthy from the mills, wash (worsh) up in the basement, then come upstairs for supper.
People say that mill workers came home, they were super dirty, they didn’t want to dirty the house, so they went in through the basement, showered in the basement and did their bathing in the basement and then came upstairs where the house was clean
This article proffers another explanation, that basements were servants’ quarters. While that’s no doubt true for some of the more gigantic houses in Pittsburgh, it can’t be true for all of them. My grandpa, who’s in his late 80s, still showers in the cinderblock shower stall in the small house where my dad was born and raised.