Letter From Astoria
from the Winter 2002 print MISC
by Matthew Stadler
ASTORIA, OREGON is a city of 10,000, covering most of a hilly peninsula where the Youngs River meets the Columbia and the two empty into the Pacific. The weather is severe, astonishing, and the city itself is very old, first settled in 1811.
It is a city, not a town. Taxicabs navigate the narrow grid of downtown streets, shadowed by a tall art-deco hotel, office blocks, and brick apartment buildings. There are alleyways, canneries along the waterfront, secret tunnels under ground–all the stuff of literature, which Astoria has in fact become. It was a novel (Washington Irving’s eponymous international best-seller of 1836) 15 years before Seattle was even a single roofless cabin.
I moved here last year, to a huge, derelict house I bought for about two-thirds what my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle had cost.
THE UNIONTOWN Steam Bath, just below the porn shop, opened in 1928 and is still in business. I go there on Thursdays, sometimes Fridays and Saturdays too. On Saturday there’s a beer party in the “men’s public sauna”–a cooler full of Hamm’s, plus foam collars for the beers so the steam doesn’t warm them.
The talk is animated and coarse, sometimes clever: A call to bomb Berkeley for its rumored stance against the American war in Afghanistan is shouted down by bikers who point out that neighboring Oakland is world headquarters for the Hell’s Angels. Partisans take sides. New clearcutting on state forest land is both attacked and applauded. Bush is differentiated from Cheney, Cheney from Ashcroft, and each is allotted subtly calibrated degrees of contempt or admiration.
This steam bath is the kind of civil society I recall from Holland, the last place I lived where people conducted public discourse in the nude. Like Holland, Astoria enjoys a robust libertarianism that seems driven primarily by the capitalist instinct for free exchange, unhindered by morals.
I tell friends Astoria is just like San Francisco, if San Francisco had collapsed after the gold rush. The operative word is collapse.
Astoria has been failing for longer than most of the urban Northwest has existed. It is a comfortable, even attractive, place to fail. No city has done it longer.
IT WAS FOUNDED by a New York fur trader and venture capitalist named John Jacob Astor, the richest man in the world at the time (described in his obituary as a “self-invented money-making machine”). Astor financed an expedition to the mouth of the Columbia to build a city that would monopolize the nascent Pacific fur trade. It was America’s first infusion of capital into the region; the rest, as they say, is history.
I like to call the whole Northwest “Greater Astoria,” as a reminder that its operative ecology has been shaped as much by the circulation of capital as by the circulation of water, an assertion made by the detestable name “Cascadia.” “Cascadia” is this region’s last nature poem; I prefer Greater Astoria’s tale of heedless capital and urbanization.
If anything marks us, it is that capital–with all of its hunger for motion and speed–arrived here, free from the burden of institutions that in every other place had slowed its movement: Family, church, even rudimentary humanist values like decency, self-determination or respect, were, in effect, absent here as capital made its giant sucking sound and mobilized every dormant resource (from trees to fish to minerals to men) with impunity.
This unbridled behemoth also brought a rich harvest of delayed, reactionary initiatives: The defense of human rights through organized labor; utopian experiments proposing economies free of money; an abiding ecological sensibility. Greater Astoria’s marriage of great exploitation and reactionary retrenchments is simply what unhindered capital looks like.
Astor failed here (though his name stuck), fur dwindled, and fisheries, canning, and logging rose to replace it. These three collapsed and returned, variously, from the mid-19th to the late-20th centuries, while inland vacationers arrived to pursue their seasonal entertainments. Then people like me began to settle, modems in hand.
MIRACULOUSLY–and uniquely among this region’s many failed emporia–Astoria today belongs to no one faction. It is a heterogenous city where no single industry nor social stratum dominates.
Stray tourists endure the stink of fish processing to watch sea lions scarf guts off the pier. Out-of-work loggers swim laps with seniors at the new city pool. An ex-Marine peddles his lefty newspaper (in its 26th year) from the used bookstore where he clerks on Saturdays. Job Corps kids from Tongue Point gather in knots by the movie theater. Idle salmon fishermen strategize over cocktails at the Feed Lot. A German software genius learns carving from a guy in Warrenton who’s now part-time at the mill. In Astoria everyone stays “afloat” because the water level has dropped so low.
Everything’s cheap here, and there’s a lot of it. I live in a towering 100-year-old house built by a riverboat captain on his retirement. I had thought I was very lucky to find it; but it turns out Astoria has hundreds of such houses (and mine is an especially run-down example). The city has never had enough money for urban renewal; so everything stays as it was, most of it in poor repair.
Victorian and craftsman houses dominate, the legacy of 19th century maritime and logging wealth, while downtown there’s a lot of art deco. (A fire wiped out downtown’s center in 1922; the next year it was rebuilt in brick and terra cotta.)
Amidst the older stuff there are surpassing examples of post-WW II design, from a ’60s four-story apartment complex (in a fabulous double-winged “V”) perched near the hill’s crest, to a neatly modulated necklace of woodsy ’70s apartments stair-stepping down the slope, to an astonishingly brutal Soviet-style apartment block straight out of Zagreb, pitched up out of the river on concrete pillars.
The result is a kind of encyclopedic mini-museum of architecture, small enough to wander in. Late at night, while most of the city sleeps and only the restless taxis drift through the empty streets, I go out to observe these treasures (most of which are, for better or worse, for sale).
OH, THERE ARE PROBLEMS. Astoria has no decent wine store. (You should start one.) Local sheriffs nearly killed a tree-sitter by driving him batty with lights and loud music, then cutting all the branches off his tree. Those Job Corps kids hang out at the movie theater because there’s no place else to go except a Christian-only youth center. Live music is generally lousy.
Fishermen can’t make a profit, no matter how big the runs get. Poverty drives a lot of lives here. In Astoria it’s all pretty visible, but at least there’s no higher station toward which to claw.
As a result, the bars are friendly. Denizens of the High Climber Room don’t turn their hickory-shirted backs to book-toting wine-drinkers like me. In Forks, WA, by contrast, I never dared ask about wine. The cocktail slinger at the Voodoo lounge takes food stamps (don’t rat on him), while in Port Townsend bars courting tourists treat local poverty as the mark of the devil (unless it’s that cultivated brand of poverty self-righteously called “voluntary simplicity”). Meanwhile, down on Astoria’s waterfront, hippies dance with fishermen at the Wet Dog.
THERE ARE BATTLES here, but what is there to win?
Astoria’s future pivots on a handful of questions: Will the community college be allowed to move onto a downtown site that could revitalize year-around pedestrian business in the city? Will environmental concerns curtail logging of old growth and other rare forests in the surrounding county? Will the planning board relax long-standing laws against larger chain stores and allow them inside the city limits? Will opposition to the deepening of the Columbia River channel succeed and make Astoria a much busier port by preventing upriver traffic? How will fishermen survive the reductions in bottom fish quotas and populations?
AFTER THE STEAM bath I drink at the Elks Lodge, sitting by the bandstand of an art-deco ballroom looking out on downtown.
Delinquents loiter by the courthouse. Taxis speed past, on their way to pick up drunks in Uniontown, where bars cluster in the shadow of the bridge. Noise from the cannery echoes up the hill, running all night to handle this year’s freakish sardine run, the biggest in 95 years. Container ships taller than downtown slip past the docks and block out the sky.
I can’t think of a better place to spend hard times.
