archive of old texts

Astoria: Notes and Descriptions

by Clare Guest

My new city was founded by John Jacob Astor, a captain of primitive accumulation. It is "the oldest permanent settlement west of the Rockies." I love the qualifier "permanent" in this formula, because it is such a slippery little metonymy for the West. (The Europeans, or the bringers of permanence—as if history was not composed equally of transience.) In any case, Astoria is historical. But its historicity reveals itself in quiet ways: it seems to have escaped the immaculate preservations of the planners, as well as the liquidating flows of tourism found closer to the coast. It feels at once fresh and a little shabby, still marked with the residues of industry and the blue-collar. The logic of the simulacra does not stick here, if only due to neglect. Astoria's history is a sort of rangy, heterogeneous palimpsest.

Seen from above, Astoria would look like a city on a hill, tucked into a little peninsula formed by the Columbia river and Youngs bay. Houses—some of them (including my new residence, the home of M and Clear Cut Press) spacious Victorian affairs—occupy the hill; to get downtown one simply descends. (Young skateboarders take this logic to its conclusion: in the evening I hear them careening breakneck down the hill.) Looking north from downtown, the view is dominated by Astoria's most prominent built feature, the 101 Bridge across the Columbia. It is an imposing and truly monumental structure—far more so than Astoria's official monument, the Astoria Column. Between the two there is a strict dialectic. The bridge is about movement: of cars, but also the massive container ships passing beneath it. This is a system of flickering absences, the ghostly and a-historical logic of exchange, of "just passing through." The column feels less ambitions, with its official denotations of geography and time, ready-made for a quaint postcard. The claims of presence are modest.