Ft. George Garden, Astoria

View Larger Map

I was rummaging through an old iPhoto library a while back and noticed I had a few photos of of the Ft. George Garden in Astoria, an overgrown rose garden surrounded by an ornate iron fence, on Exchange St. behind the Fort George Brewery. These photos were taken several years ago, shortly before the brewery opened. Apparently they've employed a gardener to look after the place, so it may not be as overgrown as it was the last time I was there.

The garden sits next to a small city park marking the site of Fort Astoria, a fur trading post founded in 1811, which happened to be the first American settlement on the Pacific coast. After only two years in business, the fort was sorta-captured by the British during the War of 1812, and spent the next 33 years as Fort George (as in King George the 3rd), an outpost of the Hudson's Bay Company. The post was later abandoned as the Hudson's Bay Company moved its main operations inland to Fort Vancouver. I don't know whether the garden itself has any particular historical significance. Based on the fencing I'm going to guess the garden (or at least the fence) dates to the late 19th or early 20th century, or later if someone was aiming for a retro look.

Doughboy Monument, Astoria

A few old (2007-ish) photos of the "Doughboy Monument", the slightly odd World War I memorial out in Astoria, at the corner of Marine Drive & Columbia Avenue, just east of the Astoria-Megler Bridge. The slightly odd bit is the low building that forms the base of the statue. It doesn't seem to have any obvious purpose, but it does. Any guesses? No? Why, it's a public restroom, of course. Really, it is. It dates back to the 1920's, when there seems to have been a mania for adding public restrooms to various improbable things, like the Oregon City Bridge for instance. I've never seen a good explanation for this. Did people just drink a lot more water than they do today? Beats me.

Astoria, Oregon Daily Photo has a nice post about the monument, including the various inscriptions around it. Which is nice, since they're are too small to see in my photos. The author expands on that in "Astoria's Doughboy Monument: Finding an angle", in which she tries to figure out a good angle to shoot it from. Busy backgrounds in most directions, and wayyy too many overhead wires. I remember running into this problem too when I took the photos in this post, and thanks in advance for pretending you hadn't noticed.

Portland Public Art covers the doughboy here, calling it "dull and mechanical". Also a mention of it (and the sculptor's many similar works) at ~westr. (Scroll down to the "Soldier's Monument" bit.)

The statue on top is titled "Over the top at Cantigny", by the sculptor John Paulding. Cantigny is a small town in France, and the site of the first WWI battle involving US soldiers. The town now features a large memorial to US troops, and another smaller one outside of town. Among those who served at Cantigny was Col. Robert McCormick, later the right-wing owner of the Chicago Tribune. I mention this because he had a 500 acre estate outside Chicago (now a park), which he named "Cantigny". The battle also lent its name to an Army transport ship of the 1920's.

Astoria-Megler Bridge

View Larger Map

From deep in the mini-roadtrip archives, here are a few photos of the Astoria-Megler Bridge, which crosses the mouth of the Columbia out in Astoria. I just did a post on Portland's Interstate Bridge, so it seemed like a good time to post these. That way it almost looks like my posts here aren't completely random, I guess.

I'm not going to bother with a "pictures from the interwebs" section. It's on the coast, and a large chunk of the coastal workforce is employed making pictures of various bridges along the coast. Go ahead, check Flickr, or do a Google image search. You'll be inundated.

I probably ought to apologize for having so few photos of the bridge here. In my defense, these were taken the year before last, using a puny compact digicam, and I had no idea at the time that I was about to get sucked into an ongoing bridge project. If only I'd known, I'd have taken more photos, and some of them might have even been good. It's possible, but now we'll never know...



Continuing on... As far walking goes, sadly we're faced with the same situation as with the Fremont & Marquam bridges in Portland: Generally speaking, pedestrians are banned from the bridge. The bridge was built in 1966, back when people thought walking was obsolete, and so there's no sidewalk on the bridge. However once a year they do offer something called the "Great Columbia Crossing", where you do get a chance to run or walk across the thing. It's scheduled for October 11th this year (2009) and I've thought about driving out and having a go at it. But I probably won't get to it this year, so don't hold your breath. You're free to try it without waiting for me though (in case you didn't already realize this), although I should point out that the bridge is four miles long, and no guarantees can be made about what mid-October weather on the Oregon Coast will be like. In the meantime, here's a good blog post about a trip to Astoria which included last year's Columbia Crossing, also with pastries and herons (though not all at the same time).

Actually I'm going to go ahead and violate the "no photos from the interwebs" rule I just made, briefly, to pass along a couple of photosets from the 2007 edition of the event: one on Picasa, the other on Webshots. Also, here's the Flickr set that goes with the blog post I just mentioned. Ok, there, we're done.

You might note that I don't have any photos from on the bridge itself. I was on a solo mini-roadtrip at the time, so I didn't have someone to drive as I took photos, or to take photos as I drove. And driving over the bridge is a white-knuckle experience if you don't do it on a regular basis, so I didn't seriously consider driving and taking pictures at the same time. I suppose you get used to driving the bridge if you do it regularly. Either you do that, or you drive way upstream and take the ferry at Westport. Which is kind of interesting, but it's not what you'd call fast. As it turns out, I actually drove across the bridge on this trip just so I could drive upstream and take the ferry back to the Oregon side.



As for the semi-obligatory "links from the interwebs" part, a couple of the usual suspects come through for us again here.

• There's a Structurae page for the bridge, although it mostly repeats the info in the Wikipedia article.
  
  
• There's also a page at Columbia River Images that gives a bit more background on the bridge, and on the ferries that preceded it.
  
  
• The same site has a page about Megler, which (unlike Astoria) isn't a city or even a proper town. The usual phrase for a place like this is "wide spot in the road", but I tried to find the place and didn't even notice a wide spot in the road. There isn't even a ghost town full of picturesque ruins, since abandoned wooden buildings don't last long in this climate. I suppose it could've fallen into the sea similar to Port Royal in Jamaica, and someday some lucky marine archeologist will find the drowned city and its fabulous piles of pirate booty. There might even be mermaids and mermen guarding it. But I wouldn't bet on it.
  
  Other than a few old pilings in the river, there seems to be nothing right on the Washington side of the river, and as far as I can tell this "Megler" place is purely mythological in nature. Or if not purely mythological, perhaps the town appears in the coastal mists just once a century, like a sort of flannel-wearing redneck Brigadoon, with banjos instead of bagpipes. But I wouldn't bet on that either.
  

Astoria Column, then & now

View Larger Map

Here are a few pics of, and from, the Astoria Column out in (you guessed it) Astoria. Some were taken on my mini-roadtrip last month, and others are from the only other time I've been there, wayyy back in February 1979.

Regarding the 1979 pics, the originals actually look better than what you see here. The scanner I used on these is about a decade old. It doesn't do an overly professional job of figuring out colors, and its dynamic range is pretty limited, so if you have a photo with light parts and dark parts, you can get one or the other to come out somewhat decently. But not both. And it puts ugly vertical bands on everything it scans. And square objects come out a tad on the rectangular side, like photo #2 above. On the other hand, the scanner was free, and Ubuntu's default install includes a driver for it. So that's something, I guess.

The first couple of photos in the slideshow are more or less the same view of downtown Astoria, taken 28 years apart. The two roughly squarish photos were taken with a 126 camera, which you basically can't even find film for anymore. I'm not 100% sure whether I took those or not, since my own camera was a little 110 just like this one.

Here are a few of the column itself.

The old photos show the column was looking quite ramshackle in 1979. Just like everything else in Astoria back then, if memory serves. I'm afraid we have to thank the rich Californians for the city's recent revival... but don't tell them I said so. They're plenty smug enough already, the bastards.

The recent one (top one, silly) really isn't that great, I admit. I was mostly taking shots of the view from the column, but as an afterthought I decided I needed at least one photo of the column itself and took a quick snap of it. (If you want to see better photos of it, there's no shortage of them out on the interwebs. There are even a couple VR panoramas, which are less vertigo-inducing than you might expect.)

The column doesn't actually lean like that, in case you're wondering. Although that would make the trip up the stairs even more exciting than it already is. It's a dark, winding, narrow, rickety, alarming little staircase, with lots of tiny little oddly-shaped spiral steps.

If I'd taken a better recent pic, you could see how the city completely renovated the exterior a couple of years ago. There wasn't much they could do with the stairs, though. It's not like they could've made them any wider or anything.

In my defense, photographically speaking, the camera wasn't shaking in these shots. It was me that was shaking. Oh, and the stairs were shaking, too. I didn't remember the stairs being that scary in 1979.

Several kids ran past me on the stairs going both directions. Who knows, maybe they'll come back 30 years from now and they'll wonder if it was always that scary. Or they'll just float up to the top with their antigravity boots, sneering at all the poor chumps of decades past who had to worry about stuff like "stairs" and "exercise".

So anyway, here's the very top of the column, taken from the balcony.

A few grain ships on the Columbia. Ships tend to park in Astoria temporarily on their way to Portland. I don't know if it's due to the tide, or they're waiting in line for a river pilot, or the Astoria visitor's bureau pays them to create some nautical ambience, or what it is, exactly.

Looking south, here's Saddle Mountain and (I think) the Lewis and Clark River.

Just across the parking lot from the column, and steps from the gift shop, is this odd memorial to a local Indian chief who befriended Lewis & Clark while they were here, 200-odd years ago.

The memorial only dates to 1961, and was put together by people claiming to be descendants of the aforementioned chief. Which is a nice touch, certainly, although I don't know how you'd ever be able to prove a claim like that. If you're running a cash-strapped city parks department, and someone comes along wanting to give you something for free, most likely you don't ask a lot of tough questions. They could say grandpa was the Shah of Atlantis, for all you care, so long as their checks clear. But hey, I'm always a cynic, in case you hadn't noticed.