John Jacob Astor Hotel
| John Jacob Astor Hotel | |||
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| National Register of Historic Places | |||
| Historic District Contributing Property | |||
 The former Astor Hotel in 2011 |
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| location | 342 14th Street Astoria, Oregon |
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| Coordinates | 46 ° 11 '19.4 " N , 123 ° 49' 41.8" W | ||
| Built | 1922-1923 | ||
| architect | Tourtellotte & Bumblebee | ||
| Architectural style | Art Deco , neo-Gothic | ||
| NRHP number | 79002046 | ||
| The NRHP added | November 16, 1979 | ||
The John Jacob Astor Hotel , originally known as the Hotel Astoria , is a historic hotel building in Astoria , Oregon, in the United States. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) on November 16, 1979 . It is one of the tallest buildings on the Oregon Coast and can be seen from afar in Astoria. Built in 1922-23, the hotel opened in 1924 and was initially a center of the city's social and economic life, but a number of problems soon arose and the hotel struggled for years with financial difficulties. It was renamed the John Jacob Astor Hotel in 1951, but the economic decline continued and a number of other problems came along. For security reasons, the city ordered the demolition of the building in 1968, which remained unused until 1984, when renovation work began and in 1986 it was converted into an apartment building, with the two lowest floors being dedicated to commercial use. Thanks to an antenna on the building, the world's first cable television system was installed in Astoria in 1948 .
history
Construction began in November 1922. Construction work ended at the end of 1923 and the hotel began operating on January 1, 1924. When construction began, plans included a five- story new building, but just a month later, on December 8, 1922, a major fire broke out that destroyed much of the center of Astoria. The resulting shortage of apartments led the Columbia Hotel Company to revise plans for the hotel and build eight stories instead. When completed, the hotel was the tallest building in Oregon outside of Portland and the tallest commercial building on the Oregon Coast. Emporis states the height of the building as 26 m. The building passed this rank on in 1926 to the nine-story, 33 m high new building of the Marshfield Hotel (today's Tioga Hotel) in Coos Bay . The work on the Marshfield Hotel was interrupted, however, so that the shell remained without windows until the end of the 1940s when the hotel opened as the Tioga Hotel. Until the Tioga Hotel opened in 1948, the Hotel Astoria remained the tallest in-use commercial building on the Oregon Coast.
The building has an L-shaped floor plan. On the more prominent side, the west facade, the structure extends the full length of the street block on 14th Street between Commercial and Duane Streets. On the north side, along Commercial Street, the building is almost as long, but to the south and east the facades are less than half as long. The facade color was originally largely white, the two lowest floors were gray.
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In its early days, the hotel was “the hub of business and social activities in town”. In addition to the 150 guest rooms, there were ten apartments on the top floor of the building. The local Chamber of Commerce had its office in the hotel and there was a merchant showroom in the basement. The hotel has hosted numerous meetings and several groups of citizens used its premises for their regular gatherings. But after just a few years, the hotel was in financial distress and faced a number of problems, including prohibition agents, anti-alcohol activists, trade unionists and military police. The United States Army and Navy declared the hotel a restricted area for soldiers, The Daily Astorian reported in a 2011 article. The completion of Sunset Highway in 1949 further contributed to the company's decline, as it gave Portland people a second route to the coast that bypassed Astoria. From the 1930s on, the hotel changed hands several times.
In late 1951, the Hotel Astoria was renamed the John Jacob Astor Hotel in honor of the city's namesake, John Jacob Astor . The building, visible from afar, has been repainted pink. The decline of the immediate postwar period continued, and other problems persisted as well. In 1961, the Astorias Fire Department found 51 violations of fire safety regulations, six of which were serious, but seven years later these had not yet been resolved. In early 1968, the restaurant and hotel bar were closed by the Internal Revenue Service for evading taxes.
Closure and long vacancy
In 1968 the city officials declared the building a public nuisance and a fire hazard and ordered the evacuation. With the exception of a small passenger handling of Greyhound Lines , which was still in operation in 1970, the building remained unused for several years. In 1978 the city administration made a plan to demolish the building, but voters rejected public funding for the demolition in a referendum. The Clatsop County Administration took ownership of the hotel in 1978 due to a tax arrears garnishment and auctioned it off in early 1979. In the course of the year, a group of local historians who tried to prevent the demolition of the building managed to get the building on the National Register of Historic Places. A number of proposals for renewing and reopening the “run-down eyesore”, however, did not materialize. In 1983, an article about Astoria in the Sunday Oregonian about the Astor Hotel said: "Formerly the pride of Astoria, the once elegant accommodation only houses regular trespasser and serves as a haven for alcohol-consuming adolescents who find little else to distract in Astoria on Saturday nights." The building still has the same, now faded, pink paint job from the 1950s, so the decrepit building that still dominated the Astoria skyline has been dubbed "the pink elephant" by locals. At the end of his eight-year tenure as Mayor of Astoria, Bob Chopping had given up hope of saving the hotel. "After all these years, the citizens must have realized that the chances of renovation are zero."
Conversion into apartments
At the end of 1984 a plan by a private investor was approved according to which the former hotel would be converted into 70 apartment apartments for low wage earners on the six upper floors and commercial space on the two lower floors. In 1986 the renovation was completed. The building with the 66 social apartments, now called Astor Apartments, was no longer its pink color. The two lowest floors remained largely unused until the 1990s, but gradually commercial operations moved into the business premises. The ornate lobby stayed idle until 2010 when a dealer moved in selling vintage furniture and fittings.
design
The Hotel Astoria (later the John Jacob Astor Hotel) was designed by the architects Tourtellotte & Hummel , whose headquarters were in Portland from 1922 to 1930 and who later designed two other hotels that were also included in the NRHP: the Lithia Springs Hotel in Ashland and the Redwoods Hotel in Grants Pass, Oregon. The eight-story John Jacob Astor Hotel was built of reinforced concrete and is decorated with decorative elements from the neo-Gothic style. Every third window on the seventh floor is decorated with various coats of arms , and above the groups of windows at the corners of the house on this level there are additional round arches, which are embellished with elaborate cartouches made of artificial stone. Each of the three windows on the second floor, designed as a mezzanine, have two Corinthian pilasters and are combined by a cross arch and a frieze with three small coats of arms above. The lobby is two stories high in the center and includes numerous Corinthian columns . Originally it had a large open fireplace and an elegant wrought iron chandelier with electric candles and parchment lampshades.
Birthplace of cable television
The former hotel has been called the "birthplace of cable television ". In 1948, the Hotel Astoria was home to the “world's first cable television system,” LE “Ed” Parsons, who was the owner of Astoria's radio station KAST , who invented the system. Ed Parsons used coaxial cables and a shared television antenna to deliver television signals to an area that would otherwise not have received television signals. The first television station in the Pacific Northwest was put into operation in November 1948 by the Seattle radio station KRSC , now KING-TV . Astoria is about 200 km from Seattle, and Parsons was unable to get a television picture in his apartment, even using a tall antenna. Opposite his apartment was the eight-story Hotel Astoria, and with the hotel manager's permission, he installed an antenna on the hotel roof and ran a coaxial cable from there to his apartment. The installation worked, so from Thanksgiving Day 1948 onwards, the Parsons were the only residents of Astoria who could watch television. "The reception wasn't good enough to sell today," Parsons told The Oregonian in 1972 , "but we got a picture and started attracting guests." The couple was quickly overwhelmed by requests from friends and neighbors who wanted to visit them to get to know the new medium. To satisfy that interest, Parsons put a second cable to a television in the hotel lobby, and a nearby music store became the third place in town with a television in late December. Parsons then began laying cable connections to households in the area, with 25 households connected in mid-March 1949 and 100 in July. Some time later, Parsons relocated his communal antenna from the hotel roof to another location in town and added another antenna.
See also
supporting documents
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j George T. Murphy: National Register of Historic Places Inventory - Nomination Form: John Jacob Astor Hotel ( English , PDF) National Park Service. May 5, 1979. Retrieved October 19, 2019.
- ↑ a b c Oregon National Register List (PDF) Oregon Parks and Recreation Department. June 6, 2011. Retrieved October 10, 2013.
- ↑ a b c d e f Russell Dark: Tattered Hotel Awaits Future With Beds Made (English) . In: The Oregonian , Jul 8, 1970, p. 6.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Vera Gault: John Jacob Astor Hotel began life as the Hotel Astoria (English) . In: The Daily Astorian , November 24, 2011. Archived from the original on October 11, 2013. Retrieved October 19, 2019.
- ↑ a b c d e f Francis Murphy: Early rough start for local cable (English) . In: The Oregonian , Aug. 8, 1972, pp. Section 2, pp. 7.
- ↑ Jeffrey H. Smith: Astoria ( English ). Arcadia Publishing , Charleston, SC (US) 2011, ISBN 978-0-7385-7527-8 , p. 9, (accessed October 19, 2019).
- ↑ a b Astor Apartments / John Jacob Astor Hotel / Hotel Astoria ( English ) Emporis . Retrieved October 19, 2019.
- ^ Tioga Hotel ( English ) Emporis . Retrieved October 19, 2019.
- ↑ a b Kay Atwood: National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Marshfield Hotel ( English , PDF) National Park Service. July 2, 1983. Retrieved October 19, 2019.
- ^ William Moyes: Behind the Mike (English) . In: The Oregonian , December 3, 1951, p. Section 2, p. 2. "Johnny Osburn has renamed the Hotel Astoria the 'John Jacob Astor hotel' and installed 12 apartments, new rugs, hangings and decorations"
- ^ A b c Doug Babb: Astoria: A town too stubborn to die (English) . In: The Sunday Oregonian , June 19, 1983, pp. NW4-NW5. Retrieved October 19, 2019.
- ↑ a b Hurdles cleared for hotel restoration (English) . In: The Oregonian , Nov. 8, 1984, p. MW12.
- ↑ a b Dave Burns: Lack of funds for renovation work threatens demolition of Hotel Astor (English) . In: The Oregonian , Feb.4 , 1983, p. F3.
- ↑ Katie Wilson: Vintage Hardware fills the hotel lobby [with] relics from the past (English) . In: The Daily Astorian , October 13, 2010.
- ^ A b c Patrick R. Parsons: Blue Skies: A History of Cable Television . Temple University Press , 2008, ISBN 978-1-59213-706-0 , pp. 62-63.
- ↑ a b Randy Alfred: Aug. 1, 1949: FCC Gets In on Cable TV (English) . In: Wired , August 1, 2008. Archived from the original on March 17, 2014. Retrieved on October 24, 2019.
