Shinola!

The Broad Channel owner of the Call-A-Head porta-potty empire (“We’re #1 at Picking Up #2”) is determined to transform the sleepy Jamaica Bay island into the next Newport, RI:

Charles W. Howard made his fortune in portable toilets, building a business on the island of Broad Channel that is one of the state’s biggest suppliers of porta-potties for construction sites, rock concerts and outdoor weddings and bar mitzvahs.

Now he is turning his entrepreneurial talents to Broad Channel itself. He wants to reshape the plebeian mile-long island in Jamaica Bay in Queens into something closer in splendor to Newport, R.I., or at least to Cape May, N.J., by building shops and other amenities that imitate the splendors of the Gilded Age yet have the fun of Disney World in Florida.

“My goal is to make Broad Channel like America’s great seashore communities,” he said recently. “And the reason I’m doing it here is because I can’t think of a better place to live.”

Mr. Howard’s aspirations and pretensions call to mind wide-eyed visionaries like the Donald:

Call-a-Head’s over $10 million-a-year business has allowed Mr. Howard, the company’s president, to become Broad Channel’s Donald J. Trump, with 20 properties that will eventually include an ornate pharmacy with two cupolas, medical offices for eight doctors and a Venetian cafe on an island that does not have a single drugstore, doctor or sit-down restaurant. He also envisions opening a year-round Christmas store and a hotel to be called Howard’s End Inn, not after the E. M. Forster novel but because “it’s at the end of town and my name is Howard.”

The toilet business has been good to him, giving him the island’s most opulent home, a $1.5 million house that he says was inspired by both Newport mansions and Disney pavilions, a 46-foot yacht moored right alongside, and a Jaguar and two Porsches that help him tool around the island with the swagger of its leading citizen.

. . .

His soon-to-be-opened pharmacy in Broad Channel will have mahogany shelving, but its cathedral ceiling will be light blue and soft pink.

“When you walk in you’ll think about being in an English library, but when you look up it will be like the Bahamas,” he said.

Mr. Howard takes great pleasure in finding catchy names. The pharmacy is called Wharton’s Apothecary because he noticed that names of many great American companies – Wal-Mart, Woolworth’s, Waldbaum’s – start with the outsize letter W. He is calling a deli he is converting into an old-fashioned grocery Hamberry’s, because it will sell meat and fruit. His yacht is named Both Ends, a playful allusion to his main business.

It’s hard not to see the symmetry of the story — man responsible for major stink seeks to beautify God’s creation. Sort of a cross between the Donald and, say, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.:

Then there are the next-door neighbors of Call-a-Head.

“At times the smell is obnoxious,” said John F. McCambridge, 86, a wounded veteran of the Battle of the Bulge who still runs an accounting and insurance office on the main street. “My wife was here for 16 months sick with cancer and I’d be there screaming.”

It’s not just neighbors who have objected. Investigators for the State Department of Environmental Conservation have accused the company of washing potties next to Jamaica Bay’s wetlands, and city inspectors have issued the business 17 summonses since 2000. Last November, Call-a-Head reached an agreement with the Queens district attorney’s office in which the company, without admitting wrongdoing, paid fines of $100,000 and restitution of $10,000 to clear charges of polluting protected wetlands and using unmetered city water.

. . .

Mr. Howard volunteered that his business might be out of place in Beverly Hills. But Broad Channel, he said, is no Beverly Hills.

“Nobody likes portable toilets until they have to run into one,” he said.