N O R T H C O A S T T IM E S
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E A G L E , MARPRIL 2006
ASTORIA IS BORN AGAIN
THE CITY OF ASTORIA OREGON IN THE 1880s
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
Astoria (Oregon) is five years short of its bicentennial,
a young city in comparison to world cities, yet the oldest in the
American West this side of the Mississippi River. Other western
cities now in the USA are older but were taken by conquest from
post-colonial Mexico in the mid-19th century.
Astoria was named after John Jacob Astor, a pelt czar
who was friends with Thomas Jefferson, and perhaps nowhere
else in the world is a holiday made in his honor. He never got
closer than 2,000 miles to the city named for him. A myth that
has grown about him is that he founded Astoria and died on the
Titanic when it sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic
101 years later (his namesake grandson was aboard).
The city of Astoria was built on wooden pilings on the
Columbia River ten miles inland from the Pacific Ocean, and on
steep hills that rise from its waterfront. For most of its existence,
after a brief flurry of pelt extraction in concert with local native
tribes that were soon diseased nearly to extinction from neo-
European viruses, Astoria’s primary livelihood was built around
fish and timber. Furs and the China trade inspired its origin but
salmon made it rich. The city became famous in the late 19th
century as the salmon canning capitol of the world. It was said
that before the arrival of Scandinavian fisherpeoples that a
person could cross the Columbia on the backs of the salmon.
The salmon would last forever, people said. So would the trees.
During Astoria’s most prosperous period ships loaded
cargoes of fish, timber and grain for everywhere in the world
and disgorged fancy goods coming in. A saloon was claimed to
be every 13 steps with a whorehouse inbetween to service the
rowdy crowds of mariners, fishermen, loggers and farmers,
many of whom were drugged and shanghaied aboard hellships
sailing to Asia by an army of crimps, madams and saloon
keepers. For awhile Astoria had the second largest Chinese
population on the Pacific coast, but they were ruthlessly
displaced by arriving Europeans who took their jobs at the
more than thirty canneries.
A majority of Astoria men were salmon fishermen
on the river, in the bays and later out on the turbulent ocean
beyond the Columbia River Bar, known all over the world as
the 'Graveyard of the Pacific’ for the hundreds of boats and
ships it destroyed. Simultaneously, most of the women worked
in the canneries. For a few decades straddling the 19th and 20th
centuries Astoria had a population of nearly 30,000 and antici
pated a peak of 100,000 (the city dreamily imagined itself the
New York of the West’) but the fish and the great spruce, cedar
and fir forests that were supposed to last forever were quickly
decimated as if there were no tomorrow.
Now, in this new millennium, 195 years since the city’s
founding as a frontier fort on a bluff above the Columbia River in
1811 (April 12 is Astoria’s birthday), it is the day after tomorrow.
The millions of fish that once filled the river and ocean are a
scanty few. The great forests are clearcut, replaced by human
habitat or skimpy monoculture stands of commercial second and
third growth forest. The remaining forests that are owned by the
city came very close to being logged a decade ago, saved from
extinction only by vigorous popular uproar.
For a long time Astoria was a rough city on hard times,
most of the timber industry gone and fishing on the lower river
dwindled until only a few men and women could make a living
aboard fishboats. The legacies of lifetimes spent in the woods
or on fishboat decks ended and experienced loggers and fisher-
folk who expected to spend their lives the same way have been
forced to find other work; often menial, unpleasant and low-wage
jobs. The canneries that bought the fish were boarded up and
abandoned to rot into a forest of broken pilings that eat into the
river like decayed teeth. Old fishboats were left to disintegrate
on blocks along the decaying riverfront. And a huge fire in
1922, comparable in its destruction of downtown Astoria to the
earthquake and fire that ravaged San Francisco a hundred years
ago this April 6, seared its heart.
Great plans to develop Industry and revive the city’6
economy with aluminum plants, coal docks and shipwrecking
yards (most recently an egregious attempt to construct natural
gas terminals on the river without public input) to reverse the
long decline and revive the economy generally die in labor.
After having profited and degenerated from reckless ruination
of its resources (not to mention negligent disregard for future
generations) the city turned desperately toward tourism as
an economic strategy to market its failed history. Preservation
groups from many parts of the world visited and advised Astoria
officials on how to protect and profit from its remaining heritage.
Tourism replaced fishing and logging as the city’s prime
economy, squeezing money out of its salty past by prettifying
it — the old whore houses, saloons and opium dens seldom
mentioned in the tourist literature. The past was romanticized
while its shabbily surviving remnants seemed to disappear from t
commercial view.
Bikes & Beyond
1089 MARINE DR.
ASTORIA, OREGON
Until recently, the old city on the upper edge of the lower
48 seemed isolated and abandoned by the larger culture of
North America (though of course to its residents it seemed to
be the center of the universe). Now Astoria suffers the dubious
distinction of a boosterly acclaimed “renaissance." It has been
rediscovered, essentially as a result of the just concluded Lewis
& Clark bicentennial commemoration.
The transformation of Astoria from a resource extraction
economy has caused harm to many of its inhabitants who have
not recovered or successfully profited from the current reliance
on tourism. Tourism generally profits only a few; the rest are
paid minimum wage, usually work seasonally, receive little or
no benefits and are seldom protected from employer abuse.
This much touted renaissance might be good for prop
erty values but not for people who want an affordable place to
live. Families (and particularly young people) leave and don't
come back. An underclass is developing that perpetuates the
cycle of poverty and puts disturbing pressures on city services,
on housing which is inadequate to meet escalating need, and
on families, leading to rising domestic abuse, heavy drug and
alcohol abuse.
The so-called renaissance has a paradoxical character
in the sense that rising property values and rents displace many
who live in Astoria, in particular low-wage service workers who
are not able to afford to live in the city they work in, not to
mention the difficulty of finding affordable housing in nearby
communities. A subculture of artists, musicians and writers
(which of course includes poets) that moves into shabby low-rent
areas and revitalizes them by opening shops of art, music and
candles (erroniously labeled as “New Age” stuff) attracts the
noveau trendy, causing a cultural shift with upscale gentrification
of the low-rent parts of town, specialty boutiques and high-end
art galleries supplanting so-called street art, raising property
values that in turn cause a folktrek by the street artists who,
by pricing themselves out of where they have been, reseed
some other decaying town or part of town, perpetuating a cycle
of renewal, displacement and renewal.
Like anywhere, Astoria is besotted with petty corruptions
among its political class and rural squiredom. Most decisions are
made to benefit both local and émigré fiscal mercenaries, for
now a grasping attempt to attract tourists and homebuyers with
the potential of the city's historic riches. Undeveloped lands and
uncut trees are bitterly fought over between what a city manager
of another coastal town called “the kamikaze environmentalists
pitted against rape & pillage developers."
Tourism can only be a temporary solution to Astoria’s
problems. A more solid intellectual base must be set in place
through local schools to develop an industry Astoria could be
good at and profit from. Although Astorians realize tourism has
superseded fishing and logging as the city’s major industry,
most do not wish for their hometown to be refabricated into a
vacationer’s elysium. Visitors are welcome but Astoria belongs
to Astorians.
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
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MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER