Astoria Column

Coxcomb Hill rises about 600 feet behind Astoria, and the column on top adds 125 more, with 164 steps inside to a deck over the mouth of the Columbia, Youngs Bay, the bridge to Washington and, on a clear day, the Cascade volcanoes. It looks like a civic memorial and was a railroad's idea. Ralph Budd, president of the Great Northern, put up a dozen historical markers along his line between St. Paul and the Pacific in 1925 and 1926, and this was the last and largest. Vincent Astor, great-grandson of the fur merchant the city is named for, gave $20,000 of its $27,133.96 cost, and it was dedicated on July 22, 1926, during the city's founders' celebration.

The New York architect Electus Litchfield modeled it on Trajan's Column in Rome, and the Italian-born artist Attilio Pusterla covered it in sgraffito, cutting the design through layers of tinted plaster from a scaffold hung off the viewing platform. Only three of the fourteen bands were done on dedication day; the rest were finished that October. Read from the bottom up, the frieze begins with Robert Gray's ship entering the river in May 1792 and his first meeting with the Chinook and Clatsop, and climbs through Lewis and Clark and Astor's traders to the arrival of the railroad in 1893. A history paid for by a railroad ends, naturally enough, with the railroad.

Coastal weather wore the plaster down for decades, and a restoration was unveiled in November 1995. The gift shop sells balsa gliders, and launching one from the top is the local custom.