Activists Place 6 Toilets on Skid Row Lots

Nearly a month after Mayor Tom Bradley interceded to keep portable toilets off Skid Row sidewalks, activist Alice Callaghan struck again on Thursday, delivering six of the pale green potties to three locations in downtown Los Angeles.

This time, unable to secure city permits to put them on public property, Callaghan and her social services organization, Las Familias del Pueblo, reached agreements to place the latrines on privately owned lots--one of them within easy view of City Hall.

“We told the Row we’d get bathrooms up by Christmas,” Callaghan said, “and we’re doing it.”

The action drew swift, if reluctant, surrender from Bradley, whose office acknowledged that if the toilets are on private land, there is nothing the city can do. Last month, Bradley moved rapidly to cut off $23,000 in city funding for a proposed pilot project that would have scattered 33 chemical toilets on Skid Row sidewalks for at least three months.

When Callaghan defied City Hall by delivering nine toilets anyway, officials cited a failure to secure permits and brought pressure to have her haul them away the same day. Bradley, siding with inner-city business owners, agreed that the need for bathrooms is great but expressed fear that the toilets would become havens for cocaine addicts.

Callaghan, who said the toilets will be cleaned out once a day, hopes that they will remain in place as long as they are funded and free of problems. Initially, her organization will spend $2,520 a month to rent the toilets and the ground they are on, Callaghan said, but eventually she will need private assistance or city money to keep the project going.

Finding the locations was “extraordinarily difficult,” Callaghan said. “The business people . . . would be happy if the people on the Row would be sent off to another planet. . . . It’s a very mean-spirited community at this point.”