City could get more flush with toilets

Old Town-Chinatown activists start project to augment public facilities

By Jacob Quinn Sanders

The Portland Tribune, Oct 11, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

It’s just that, in Portland, not everybody has a place to do it Ñ when they especially need a place to do it.

Since at least 1995, a gallery of people in Southwest Portland’s Old Town-Chinatown neighborhood has attempted to pull some element of the city bureaucracy into building the toilets.

But this time, a group of six residents is finally getting results.

They have an acronym Ñ PHLUSH Ñ but have yet to decide what the acronym stands for.

“We have four possibilities, but we haven’t voted on it yet,” said Carol McCreary, vice chairwoman of the Old Town-Chinatown Neighborhood Association and quite clearly the lead PHLUSHer.

The group, which has had three meetings, has no budget. But its members hope to raise $100 for color copies for a presentation that they’ll make to the neighborhood association board in February.

There are 10 public restrooms in and around downtown, as TriMet counts them, and two are at least nominally in Old Town-Chinatown: one on Southwest First Avenue under the Burnside Bridge and another in the SmartPark garage at Southwest Naito Parkway and Davis Street.

But with her neighborhood home to the people-magnets Saturday Market and the Portland Classical Chinese Garden, McCreary wants more. She and her fellow PHLUSHers envision a near-promenade of self-cleaning public toilets, mostly urinals, because her research so far shows that more people use public toilets to urinate and that a large majority of those who use public toilets are men.

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