Last year, Boss Menino was pushing for 4 a.m. bar closings. This year it's public toilets. He has gone from the Party Mayor to the Potty Mayor.

If Menino has his way, in a few months Boston will undergo its own version of home improvement. About 250 broken down and leaky bus shelters will be replaced, news ``condos'' will supplant the messy cacophony of news boxes that litter city streets, 100 information kiosks will dot street corners and eight public toilets will be built  downtown.

This new street furniture, as it's called, is strikingly attractive. The toilets, kiosks, shelters and news condos are now on display outside City Hall. Dark green in color and solidly made of steel, aluminum and granite, they were specially designed to fit into Boston's unique blend of 19th- and 20th-century architecture.

It is the public toilets, of course, that capture the most attention. In part, this is because most of us have never outgrown that grade-school fascination with bathroom humor. And the public toilets themselves are, to the extent toilets ever could be this way, quite cool. These are not disgusting, hold-your-breath port-a-potties. Spacious inside, with hot and cold running water, they are available for use for a nominal fee. After each use, the insides retract and everything - floor, ceiling, commode and sink - is automatically cleaned and sterilized.

The real story is not the street furniture itself, but Menino's sometimes single-minded quest to bring it to Boston. It's a story that says a lot about the mayor and gives one a sense as to why, six years into his mayoralty and looking ahead to a third and perhaps fourth term, he remains extraordinarily popular and seemingly immune from a serious challenge.

Menino says he first encountered street furniture on a visit in 1996 to San Francisco. The mayor, an acute observer of detail, was taken by that city's experiment with public toilets. He came back to Boston vowing to bring them to the city he runs.

Most anyone else talking about public toilets in far-away cities would be dismissed as a crank. But Menino pushed his idea and slowly won over a skeptical City Hall. He put Mike Galvin, a trusted friend and chief of basic city services, in charge of getting it done.

Cost was a problem, however. Each public toilet costs $250,000; buying all of the street furniture would run $7 million. Moreover, maintenance was expected to run around $3 million a year. Not only was the up-front cost a budget buster, but Menino knew that over time the program would fail as the almost inevitable lack of maintenance would leave the once-shiny street furniture broken and graffiti-ridden. In other words, it would all end up looking like today's bus shelters.

Thus Menino and Galvin decided that not only did they want to implement perhaps the nation's most ambitious new street furniture program, but also they wanted the whole thing for free.

By agreeing to allow advertising on the sides of the bus shelters and toilets, they figured they could entice manufacturers to do what they wanted. And indeed, they did. Three manufacturers bid fiercely for the right to manage Boston's street furniture program, and all three vowed to install and maintain the new amenities at no charge to the city.

The advertising itself is controversial. Bostonians are uncomfortable with commerce, thinking the whole thing a bit icky. But the ads are small, liquor and tobacco advertising is restricted and, in all frankness, they are vastly less intrusive than the rolling billboards we call MBTA buses.

But this being Boston, of course, there had to be a scandal. In this case, each of the three bidders hired local talent - all friends of Menino - to push their causes. Menino had appointed a commission to make a recommendation but ultimately overrode the commission and went with Wall USA, a German company. That prompted charges from the losers that the process was cooked.

Menino defends his choice on practical grounds. He was taken with Wall's proposal to build the street furniture at a new plant in Boston's empowerment zone. Given that Wall hopes to expand in the United States (and, if Boston's experiment succeeds, it seems sure that other cities will clamor for the same thing), Menino foresaw the chance of boosting the economy of some of our poorest neighborhoods.

Menino's street furniture saga is not over. The designs need to be approved by the Boston Civic Design Commission and the new furniture is sure to encounter objections from architectural boards, neighborhood groups and, in the case of the news condos, from newspaper publishers. Nevertheless, prospects for some sort of installation by the fall look good.

Menino will also have to face jibes from those who will tag him as small-minded.

Small-minded or smart?

Menino understands better than most the gestalt of the city. It's the little things that most profoundly affect Boston's quality of life. The new street furniture will make Boston a tidier and ultimately more pleasant place. And to the mother of a toddler, desperately looking for a place to change her charge, Menino's new public toilets will be a much more meaningful legacy than any skyscrapers ever could be.

Tom Keane writes regularly for the Herald. He can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.