Skip to main content
Offer nothing but a blank wall and a toilet, and Portlanders will leave neither as they found them.
Since long before the internet, the bar bathroom has been a passionate hive of free speech. It is the anonymous message board of the analog world, a venue for art and obscenity and whatever politics can be reduced to a slogan.
Portland loves, perhaps more than anything, chaotic self-expression. And so it should be no surprise that we love a bar bathroom in outsized ways. It’s the only city I know with a thousands-deep Reddit community devoted to pictures of its own public toilets. A Portland paperback guidebook devoted to the same is now in its second edition.
While guides to New York City restrooms tend to focus on sanitation or a simple desperate need for a loo, Portland seems to value an experience. Maybe we want to pee inside a video game (see page 16). Maybe we’d rather do so at a Victorian grandmother’s house (page 15), or beneath a fecund canopy of breasts (page 14).
So consider this photo essay of our 12 favorite Portland bar bathrooms a tribute to the Portland loo in all its grandiose and dingy and ridiculous variety, delivered at a moment that these canvases become more universally accessible.
In February, the Portland City Council passed an ordinance requiring that all single-occupancy bathrooms be equally available to all, regardless of gender—a simple courtesy not just to trans Portlanders but to parents of young children and caretakers of all sorts. When nature calls at cocktail club The Midnight Society, there will never be any cause to choose between moody Ian Curtis and vampy Siouxsie Sioux (page 14). Why not both?
After all: A bathroom is a place where you should feel free to be yourself.
The task of choosing a dozen of the wildest, funniest, and most singular Portland bar bathrooms is, of course, a fool’s game. Ask 10 people their single favorite Portland bar bathroom, and you receive at least 20 answers. Nevertheless, we persisted.
But note that we intentionally did not focus on opulent halls of marble and chandeliers, try-hard theme-bar fodder, or self-conscious Instagram walls. Rather, we looked for bathrooms that seemed to be what Portland also is: idiosyncratic, improvised, personal to the point of self-entertained, often gritty, and maybe even a little overtolerant of grime.
In a city of dives both high and low, we could have included any of a hundred punky Portland boîtes with graffiti walls so stratified with announcements they’d confound all but the most dedicated archaeologist, whether Mad Hanna or the Alleyway or Star Bar or Baby Doll Pizza. In the end, it fell to the bombed-out downtown bunker at the eternal Yamhill Pub to serve as ambassador for the form (page 11).
Others among our favorites stood out for simple ingenuity, like a wired honey trap designed to harmlessly out bathroom voyeurs (page 18). Still others were hearteningly personal, like a stalwart Burnside rock-’n’-roll bar (page 13) whose longtime bartender-artist fights the tide of graffiti by painting and repainting his own beloved dogs. We also included one that’s not overly public: It is instead the most singular green-room bathroom in Portland (page 18), a stairway to hell that has graced the back cover of a Norwegian dungeon synth album.
In each case, we’ve endeavored to tell the story of how each Portland bar bathroom came to be the wonderful or silly or overwhelming thing it is. But if the tale of your favorite Portland bathroom remains untold, don’t be afraid: Willamette Week plans to make “Pissing Contest” a recurring feature. If you’re curious about the backstory behind a favorite Portland bathroom, email pissingcontest@week.com and maybe we’ll find out together.
In the meantime, enjoy your stay.
Matthew Korfhage is WW’s former projects editor. At various points after that, he was a food critic in Virginia, a regional features writer across the Northeast, and a reporter covering large corporate disputes and small land-use squabbles in Delaware. He now lives, again, in Portland.
