Astoria Column on Coxcomb Hill
— a hundred and twenty-five feet of painted history.
Not only on a wall.
“A concrete tower built in 1926 on the highest hill in Astoria, decorated with a spiral sgraffito frieze of Pacific Northwest history. The 164 steps inside open onto a platform six hundred feet above the river. Visitors buy a balsa glider at the gift shop and throw it from the railing, a small tradition the city has kept for generations. — from the studio
Astoria Column on Coxcomb Hill, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Astoria Column stands 125 feet tall on top of Coxcomb Hill, the highest point in Astoria, Oregon, at about 600 feet above the Columbia River. It was completed in 1926 from a design by New York architect Electus Litchfield, paid for jointly by Vincent Astor, great-grandson of John Jacob Astor, and the Great Northern Railway. A 164-step spiral staircase inside opens to a viewing platform that overlooks the mouth of the Columbia, the Pacific Ocean, and the leading edge of the Coast Range to the south.
The column is reinforced concrete, faced with a sgraffito frieze that spirals fourteen times around the shaft and tells a fourteen-scene history of the Pacific Northwest, from Indigenous settlement through the arrival of the transcontinental railroad. The frieze was painted by Italian-born artist Attilio Pusterla in 1926 and is one of the largest surviving examples of sgraffito work in North America. The most recent restoration, completed in 2015, used a lime-based plaster system matched to the original recipe Pusterla worked from on site.
The column and surrounding park are free to enter, with a five-dollar annual parking pass that supports upkeep. The staircase climb is 164 steps, narrow at the top, and the platform is open to weather year round. Balsa wood gliders sold at the gift shop are the customary thing to launch from the railing. The tradition has run more or less continuously since the 1960s, and the gift shop staff walk the meadow once a week to gather what landed.