Media

The Portland Loo Gets Some LA Times Love

August 29, 2012 by Dave Leave a Comment

The Portland Loo continues to impress, this time in the LA Times: Portland Loo, a public toilet that skips to the head of its class

Pity the lowly public toilet, a redolent reminder of the failure of the best minds in urban planning to address the most fundamental of daily necessities.

Millions have been invested in the facilities for collective relief. Often, they have become targets for graffiti, trash-can fires, furtive needle activity, commercial lovemaking, emergency baths, laundries for the homeless, and repositories of castoff diapers.

Go to any city in America and ask whether it has fixed the public toilet problem, and most any city in America will hold its nose.

Except Portland.

Read the rest to find out how other cities are importing Randy Leonard’s vision. For more on the Portland Loo, visit the website, Facebook page, and follow @PortlandLoo on Twitter!

LA’s Transit Tourist Visits Portland

June 25, 2012 by Dave Leave a Comment

The Source, Transportation News and Views about LA’s Metro, runs an occasional series called The Transit Tourist.

The Transit Tourist takes a look at other transit systems across the globe from the first person perspective of a visitor. What can Metro learn from how these other systems treat the uninitiated – and often bumbling – tourist?

London and New York have been featured, so of course it’s Portland’s turn!

Blogger Carter Rubin recently visited our fine city for a few days, rode our fine public transit, and filed this report: The Transit Tourist: Portland, Ore.

During my week-long visit to Portland, my primary agenda was to explore a city that is often held as a model of good public transportation and urban design.

I got very lucky on the weather front: six consecutive sunny days. That made touring the city on transit and foot even easier, though perhaps I didn’t quite get a representative experience of a city known for its seemingly perpetual drizzle and rain.

The good weather made Portland even more comfortable to explore on foot. Especially in downtown and its environs, the sidewalks tend to be very generous, the streets pretty narrow, and the blocks very short — all of which make the city feel more intimate and accessible. And those are all features that make it pleasant being out in public and taking transit…weather permitting.

Read the rest at The Source.

Portland Art Museum Free Day (27-January-2012)

January 24, 2012 by Dave 2 Comments

The Portland Art Museum (1219 SW Park) is offering free admission on Friday, January 27, 2012 from 5pm until 8pm.

And there will be food carts!

The museum offers free admission ever fourth Friday (5pm-8pm) of the month, so if you can’t make it this week, mark February 24, 2012 on your calendar!

Regular adult admission is $12 ($9 for seniors 55 and up and college students, 18 and up, with ID; free admission for children up to 17).

Wall Street Journal Blog: Portland Makes Bid To Become Budding Techlandia

January 23, 2012 by Dave Leave a Comment

After opening with a perhaps inevitable Portlandia reference, the Wall Street Journal blog Venture Capital Dispatch praises Portland’s up-and-coming status as a hotbed of high tech start-ups in a post titled Portland Makes Bid To Become Budding Techlandia.

Thanks to the quirky TV show “Portlandia,” Portland, Ore., is better known for its tattoos and its gluten-free bakeries than for its tech scene. But it does have a tech scene, and a growing one at that.

In less than three years, Portland had become home to three incubators for tech start-ups—the Portland Seed Fund, backed by various city and state agencies; the Portland Incubator Experiment, backed by Nike Inc.’s advertising agency, Wieden + Kennedy, with sponsorships from Coca-Cola, Target Brands and Google; and Upstart Labs, which is just starting out.

In the post Silicon Florist‘s Rick Turoczy, who co-founded the Portland Incubator Experiment a couple years ago, comments on what makes Portland’s startup culture different:

“For so long, we’ve been watching the Bay Area or Seattle, learning what those start-up communities have done well, and we’ve learned from their mistakes,” Turoczy said. “We’re ready to start coming into our own, and we’re seeing significant investments in start-ups in town.”

Read the rest at Venture Capital Dispatch, and visit Silicon Florist for more on the blossoming startup industry in Portland, Oregon and the Silicon Forest.

The Atlantic Cities Blog Lauds the Portland Loo

January 23, 2012 by Dave 1 Comment

The Portland Loo received accolades in The Atlantic Cities design blog today:

[H]ow did these sleek compartments of metal and plastic, which may smell slightly of urine, become a cult hit among Portland’s bathroom aficionados?

Simple: They’re not as crappy as other cities’ toilets.

Read the rest: Why Portland’s Public Toilets Succeeded Where Others Failed.

The post lauds the popularity and virtues of the Portland Loo, and examines various ways the public toilets of other cities, in particular San Francisco and Seattle, suck.

Currently there are four loos, with the fifth’s first flush scheduled for next Tuesday, January 31st. The first Portland Loo, located at NW 5th and Davis, debuted on December 8, 2008.

On World Toilet Day in 2010, the third Portland Loo, at SW Naito & Ash, was unveiled before a crowd of dignitaries and fans. Local filmmaker and blogger Mike Vogel was there. He filed a report on his quest to be the first person to pee in the brand new loo.

That’s Mike in the photo above, after his successful flush that day. The same photo is featured at the top of the Atlantic Cities post.