A few weeks ago, Lucille McAleese was opening her beloved Kells, an Irish-themed pub and restaurant in Portland’s Old Town Chinatown. Mornings can make or break your day, and that morning, someone took a big shit right in front of Kells’ front door. Lucille’s retching and gagging soon turned to anger, so she called the local news, and camera crews swooped in.
Almost everyone who lives, works, or ventures into Old Town Chinatown has stories of routinely having to avoid stepping in coils of human shit. Lucille says that during the summer she finds poop in the parking lot behind Kells almost every night.
“Cleaning it up is something you can’t ask the staff to do. My husband, Gerard, usually has to do it,” Lucille told me. “When I see it, I want to throw up. It’s a very visceral reaction.”
Flanked by the pseudo-cultured Pearl district to the west, Downtown to the south, and the broad Willamette River to the east, Old Town Chinatown houses some of the most iconic parts of the city.
Whenever tourists visit, most of them need to see the White Stag sign, Union Station, and the remnants of the underground tunnels that were used for Shanghaiing unwitting sailors, according to legend.
Ten years ago, Portland was nothing more than the second-biggest city in the drab Pacific Northwest, but it seems like every day some national publication has it atop some internet click-through best-of list. Many out-of-town visitors I talked to in Old Town said they were shocked by the state of the district. Few imagined that waiting in line for a doughnut, or taking a picture under the neon Portland sign, would mean tiptoeing over turds on skid row.
