IT was a damp, wind-whipped Thursday night in Astoria, Ore., but inside the Fort George Brewery & Public House an eclectic, standing-room-only crowd kept warm and dry. Ol’ Danny Barnes, a Washington State-based singer and banjoist, twanged and crooned before a hooting audience of Astorians who had poured into the space on their way home from work. In the crowd were Coast Guard officers, marine biologists, nursing students — and the waitress who had served me lunch earlier that day.
Leah Nash for The New York Times
Dawn rises over the town's weathered Victorians and aging Deco-era buildings.
More Photos » I finagled a stool at the pub’s sturdy wooden counter and, taking a cue from my bar mates, ordered beer-battered fish and chips and a dark, potent stout. Occupying the next stool over was Josef Gault, a Fort George regular and self-described “wild Hungarian.” Mr. Gault — actually a native of Detroit — is a musician and cultural events coordinator at the local community college. In his estimation, the town’s blustery climate and its cultural vibrancy are intertwined. “Because of its turbulent weather,” he said, “Astoria attracts artists.”
It wasn’t always so. For most of its history, Astoria — a former pelt trading post named after the fur baron John Jacob Astor — was a hub of the West Coast
fishing industry and home to more than a dozen seafood canneries. It is also the place where the tuna fish sandwich, that national cultural icon, was popularized. Before becoming the quintessential lunchtime meal of post-war America, albacore was “discovered,” tested and canned at the local Bumble Bee lab. The town, you might say, is to canned tuna what Detroit is to the automobile.
But in the years since Bumble Bee, once Astoria’s largest employer, closed its plant in the early ’80s, the town has transformed itself from an industrial whistle-stop — albeit one with more than its fair share of glamorous Victorian homes — to a cosmopolitan artists’ enclave, rife with funky shops, fine
art galleries and enticing cafes. And in May, Astoria will celebrate
its bicentennial as
the oldest American settlement west of the Rockies with a series of fairs, festivals and lectures.
While other former fishing and shipping ports have withered, Astoria, a town of about 10,000 just two hours northwest of Portland, has actively preserved its on-the-waterfront identity. Each February, during the lull between the end of Dungeness crab season and the spring run of King
salmon, Astoria honors its maritime culture with the Fisher Poets Gathering, an art,
music and literary festival devoted to work that “comes from experiences living and working” on the water. The event, which will observe its 15-year anniversary next year, draws, according to
the event Web site, “skippers and deckhands, cannery workers and deck grunts” from around the region to read and sing and celebrate the life of the commercial fisherman.
As Northwestern salmon stocks dwindled, the seafood canneries that once lined the Columbia River shut down and the waterfront area — once a place of working men and vice — became increasingly stagnant. But instead of being demolished, several of the former canneries were given new life as the
Cannery Pier Hotel, the Bridgewater Restaurant and, in 2002, Pier 39, a maritime-themed business park.
Throughout town, in fact, there are other signs of renewal, as businesses with a straight-from-Portland feel have opened one after the next. There’s the hip Commodore Hotel; the Astoria Coffeehouse & Bistro, serving “neo-regional cuisine”; the Voodoo Room, a bar and indie music venue; and — in this postcard-size town — no fewer than three different brewpubs.
As in the rest of Oregon, beer is a big deal in Astoria. There are old-school bars with rowdy reputations, like the Desdemona Club and Annie’s Tavern. But out across a rickety-looking wood plank jetty, there’s a new beer hall that is attracting a different kind of customer. There, perched above the river 500 feet offshore, the oldest building on the waterfront, the 136-year-old former Bumble Bee cannery, has been renovated and rebranded as
Pier 39-Astoria. The complex is now home to the Astoria outpost of the
Rogue Ales Public House — a day-trip destination for beer-happy Portlanders.
When I arrived at Pier 39, the sky was dark and churning, the water speckled with whitecaps built by the gale winds. The storm assaulted the drafty, wooden structure with violent gusts and pounding hail, making it feel like a ship on a roaring sea. (Indeed, the oldest buildings in the complex have roofs made using the upside-down, tongue-and-groove beam construction of vintage sailing ships.) A rock jetty and metal seawall protected the local fishing fleet; a massive red freighter traveled downriver, returning from Portland.
The complex is the passion project of Floyd Holcom, a local developer and president of the Port of Astoria Commission, which oversees and promotes the port. About a decade ago, he bought the building with a group of partners. When they wanted to tear it down, he bought them out and took it on alone.
“I was born and raised in Astoria, so I grew up with a lot of old people who aren’t around anymore,” he said. “All our parents worked in the canneries, or were fishermen or longshoremen.”
At Pier 39, Mr. Holcom has carefully cultivated the romance of the Astoria waterfront by recruiting businesses with nautical cred — some real, some contrived. There’s a
kayak and scuba rental shop, and Four Winds Canvas Works, which sells totes and clam-digging bags quilted from salvaged Kevlar sail fabric. Out of the cannery’s former boiler room, Four Winds also runs a small marine consignment store, which resells boat miscellanea, like old brass portholes, used wetsuits, 100-pound anchors, even a hand-pump marine toilet.
Among the Pier’s eccentricities are a small, ill-kept but amusing museum dedicated to Astoria’s history as the “Salmon Canning Capital of the World,” and a crab tank where Dungeness — one of the great delicacies of the Pacific Northwest, as any local will tell you — are raised and sold to area restaurants. Even the Coffee Girl shop has embraced the maritime aesthetic: its walls are hung with weathered wooden oars and orange-and-white buoys; a tattooed barista wore a bushy fisherman’s beard.
