ASTORIA —

From the deck of my hotel room, built atop pilings 600 feet off the south bank of the Columbia River, I watch as a large California sea lion rolls in the waves searching for salmon. Far behind the animal, I can make out the cedar-cloaked Washington shore on the north side of the river, 3½ miles distant. A horn sounds and an enormous ship cruises past, near enough that I can read the numerals on the sides of the Hanjin containers.

I am staying at the Cannery Pier Hotel, a 46-room luxury boutique property that opened in 2005 directly beneath the towering Astoria-Megler Bridge. It’s the linchpin in a tourism revival that has seen Astoria — the oldest community in North America west of the Mississippi River — rediscover some of the prosperity that it once enjoyed when it was known as “the salmon canning capital of the world.”

The last time I visited this town at the mouth of the Columbia, about four years ago, Astoria appeared to be in severe decline. Downtown shop windows were boarded up and an all-too-frequent drizzle (average annual rainfall is 67 inches a year) dampened spirits. When a 50-year-old replica of Fort Clatsop, where Lewis and Clark spent the winter of 1805-06, burned to the ground in late 2005, the community could have thrown up its collective hands in frustration.

They didn’t, however, and today, enthusiasm among Astoria’s 10,000 people is as high as the Astoria Column, which overlooks the town from the top of Coxcomb Hill. To honor the explorers’ bicentennial visit, the fort was quickly rebuilt. Portland architect and developer Robert “Jake” Jacob, born and raised in Astoria, constructed the Cannery Pier Hotel and helped to revitalize a waterfront trolley system and the historic Liberty Theatre. Soon several fine restaurants opened to bolster a tourism infrastructure that already boasted Oregon’s best maritime museum and an outstanding array of Victorian-era homes.

Topsy-turvy past

Astoria is used to economic swings. Founded as a trading post in 1811, five years after Lewis and Clark’s Clatsop winter, it got its start as the hub of John Jacob Astor’s New York-based Pacific Fur Co. The company was sold to the British in 1813, but the beaver and sea otter played out, and the fort became an isolated outpost until Oregon Trail pioneers began arriving in the 1840s.

Before long, salmon fishing and processing became the prime industry, along with logging and the shipping of timber to San Francisco and points south. An influx of new immigrants — many of them from Finland, Sweden and Norway — was due in no small part to the area’s similarity to their Scandinavian homeland.

Incorporated in 1876, twice a survivor of devastating fires (1883 and 1922), Astoria thrived as a fishing center. By the end of World War II, 30 canneries operated along the river, and the citizenry embraced the omnipresent odor as “the smell of money.” Young people like Jake Jacob, a 1967 Astoria High School graduate, found ample opportunity for after-school and summer jobs scaling, gutting and packing fish.

But Bumble Bee Seafood moved its headquarters from Astoria in 1974 and closed its last cannery in 1980. In 1989, the town’s largest plywood mill shut down, and in 1996, the Burlington Northern Railway discontinued service. The town was in big trouble.

The Cannery Pier

As a young man, Jacob couldn’t wait to get out of Astoria. “It thought it was small and dismal and rainy,” he said. He studied architecture at the University of Oregon and eventually settled in Portland. But Astoria never left his mind — “It had all the right things wrong with it” — and some time around 1992 he began exploring the possibility of investing in his hometown.

“I’d walk along the docks at night with my dog,” he remembered, “and think, why not? If people would go to a beach hotel where the view is always the same, why not the river, where the view is always changing? What if they were on the water watching traffic go by?”

The Union Fishermen’s Co-operative Packing Co., known locally as Union Fish, had closed in 1970 and had been demolished in 1980, leaving behind a deteriorating wooden pier and hundreds of pilings. Here, beneath the world’s longest continuous-truss bridge, was the perfect place for his hotel, Jacob decided. Not surprisingly, he had a hard time getting bank loan officers to share his vision.

“They wanted to know what I was doing, building a boutique hotel in an industrial zone, in a crummy town and a rotten hotel market,” he said. “But I knew Astoria would come around. It had a 1920s-era downtown, a working waterfront, amazing Victorian homes … I just had no idea it would take off this much, this fast.”

The Cannery Pier Hotel opened in August 2005. Jacob designed it based upon old photos of the Union Fish cannery, with the same shapes, window and roof line, faux smokestacks, exposed steel beams, wrought-iron railings and hanging lights. “We tried to do a fully industrial look,” he said.

And very important in the construction was the view. “No matter where you are,” he pointed out, “you’re in contact with the river and its traffic.” Not only does every room face the water; even the corridors, the exercise area and the Finnish-style sauna have river views. That goes as well for the lobby lounge, where wine and salmon hors d’oeuvres are served nightly, and local characters such as crab fishermen, actors and historians often make presentations to guests.

Maritime heritage

On a day when the sun breaks through the clouds and the Columbia rolls placidly past the hotel, it’s a stretch to imagine this as the “graveyard of the Pacific.” But some 2,000 vessels, including more than 200 large ships, have sunk in or just beyond the river mouth since 1792, when it was first entered by Captain Robert Gray. (He named the river after his ship, the “Columbia Rediviva.”)

More than 700 sailors have died here, where the outflow from a great river collides head-on with high seas to create shallow, shifting sand bars. Add unpredictable weather and you’re left with one of the most dangerous crossings in the world. Back in 1977, the National Transportation Safety Board declared the Columbia River Bar “a specially hazardous area,” the only river bar so designated in more than 88,000 miles of U.S. coastline.

Two dozen Astorians are trained as Columbia River Bar pilots, certainly a unique career niche. They study the sea floor until it’s an indelible part of their memories, then board moving domestic and foreign ships to guide them through the treacherous channels. Although the river is nearly four miles wide near its mouth, the main channel is only a few hundred feet off the Astoria shore.

A great place to learn about the ocean heritage is the Columbia River Maritime Museum, one of the finest museums in the state of Oregon. Here a visitor can learn about sailing and fishing vessels of all sizes, shipwrecks, the salmon industry, lighthouses and navigational tools. There’s also an extensive display on the Navy’s three USS Astorias as well as the USS Oregon.

Spend time with exhibits defining the importance of the Coast Guard, which stages between 300 and 400 maritime rescues each year in this area, either by air or lifeboat. Then wander out to the 17th Street Dock to visit the Lightship Columbia, for three decades (1950-79) the last active lightship on the West Coast, working six miles off the river entrance in the Pacific Ocean. It was home to 17 enlisted men and one officer who suffered “long stretches of monotony and boredom intermixed with riding out gale-force storms,” according to an interpretive sign.

Historic attractions

The Clatsop County Historical Society operates both the Heritage Museum and the Flavel House. The museum, housed in the town’s 1904 City Hall, presents exhibits on the area’s American Indian heritage and its immigrant populations. The Flavel House, built as his retirement home in 1883 by Captain George Flavel, a pioneer bar pilot, was fully restored in 1951 and is now a wonderful Queen Anne-style Victorian memory of early Astoria’s prosperity.

East of town at Pier 39, the J.O. Hanthorn Cannery, founded in 1875, has been restored to its rustic essence. In addition to a brewpub, dive shop and coffee house, it features displays that recall its past life as a Bumble Bee processing plant. Take a peek into the Cannery Women’s Interpretive Center, documenting the dedication of female workers. Then wander over to Pier 36, where a herd of sea lions can be found lounging and barking, day and night.

Board the Old 300 trolley, built in 1913, for a narrated three-mile, 40-minute run along the waterfront. Volunteer-operated, it’s open Friday to Sunday from noon to dusk. Disembark at 12th Street and walk a couple of blocks to the Liberty Theatre, in the heart of downtown. A 1922 vaudeville palace, it recently underwent an $8 million renovation and now hosts live theater and concerts. Nearby is the 1924 Elliott Hotel, renovated in 2003 into a five story, 32-room hostelry.

On a low hillside above downtown, you’ll find a replica blockhouse depicting the original Fort Astoria and a memorial honoring Ranald McDonald, a half-Scot, half-Chinook Indian who in 1848-49 became Japan’s first teacher of English.

Directly under the bridge, at the west end of the trolley line, is the Uniontown-Alameda Historic District, centered around Suomi Hall, home to the Finnish Brotherhood. Other small shops in this area include Finnish workers’ bars and a Finnish steam-bath house, now closed.

Atop 600-foot Coxcomb Hill is the Astoria Column, which has provided a bird’s-eye perspective across this corner of Oregon since 1926. Looking much like a 125-foot lighthouse, it is painted in Italian renaissance style with a spiraling frieze depicting significant events in area history. Those who climb 164 steps to its observation deck are rewarded with a marvelous view that extends many miles in all directions.

And don’t miss …

Fort Clatsop is a few miles south of Astoria, but it’s a stop any history buff will want to make. Hub of the newly established Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Parks, with seven units in Oregon and six more in Washington, it commemorates the December 1805-to-March 1806 encampment of the Corps of Discovery. (The explorers saw only six days of sun in four months.)

The visitor center offers films, interpretive exhibits and ranger-led hikes. A couple of hundred yards outside is the new fort replica, designed according to William Clark’s sketches and featuring bunkhouses, storage areas and cooking facilities.

Ever since Sean Astin and Corey Feldman filmed the cult movie “The Goonies” in 1984, Astoria has been a popular location for Hollywood productions. “Short Circuit” (1985), “Kindergarten Cop” (1990), “Free Willy” (1992), “The Ring II” (2004) and “Into the Wild” (2007) are among the many movies that have been shot here, and the original “Goonies” house at 38th and Duane streets persists as a popular pilgrimage site for a new generation of visitors.

Don’t forget to add fine dining to your list of things to do in Astoria. Two places in particular stand out.

At Clemente’s, I enjoyed some of the best cioppino I’ve had anywhere. Owners Lisa Tarabochia, the fourth generation of a Columbia River fishing family, and her husband, Gordon Clemente, the third generation of a Philadelphia restaurant family, are currently located at 14th Street and Marine Drive. Early next year they will move into a new and larger space across Marine Drive in the historic 14th Street Pilot Station.

Ann and Tony Kischner, owners of the well-known Shoalwater Bistro on the southwest Washington coast, recently opened the Bridgewater Bistro in The Red Building, a marketplace and meeting space near to the Cannery Pier Hotel. The bistro serves small bites downstairs, full dinners on its mezzanine. My marlin, seared medium with a tropical salsa, provided a delicious if not entirely local seafood dinner.

I might have ordered the salmon, but I think the sea lion outside my hotel window beat me to it.

Visiting Astoria

• Gas, 510 miles @ $3.15/gallon $64.26

• Lunch, Silver Salmon Grille $22.20

• Trolley fare $1

• Dinner, Bridgeview Bistro $57

• Lodging (2 nights), Cannery Pier Hotel $328.90

• Breakfasts (2), included with hotel room $0

• Admission, Heritage Museum $3

• Admission, Flavel House $5

• Lunch, Cannery Café $8.50

• Admission, Columbia River Maritime Museum $8

• Dinner, Clemente’s $24.95

• Admission, Fort Clatsop $3

• Lunch, T. Paul’s Urban Café $12

TOTAL $537.81

• Astoria-Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce: 111 W. Marine Drive, Astoria; 503-325-6311, www.oldoregon.com

• Cannery Pier Hotel: 10 Basin St., Astoria; 503-325-4996, 888-325-4996, www.cannerypierhotel.com. Rates from $189 (one night); two-night packages from $299.

• Holiday Inn Express: 204 W. Marine Drive, Astoria; 503-325-6222, 888-898-6222, www.astoriahie.com. Rates from $107.96.

• Hotel Elliott: 357 12th St., Astoria; 503-325-2222, 877-378-1924, www.hotelelliott.com. Rates from $109.

• Rose River Inn: 1510 Franklin Ave., Astoria; 503-325-7175, 888-876-0028, www.roseriverinn.com. Rates from $80.

• Bridgewater Bistro: 20 Basin St., Astoria; 503-325-6777, www.bridgewaterbistro.com

• Cannery Café: 1 Sixth St., Astoria; 503-325-8642, www.cannerycafe.com

• Clemente’s: 1335 Marine Drive, Astoria; 503-325-1067

• Drina Daisy Bosnian Restaurant: 915 Commercial St., Astoria; 503-338-2912, www.drinadaisy.com

• Silver Salmon Grille: 1105 Commercial St., Astoria; 503-338-6640, www.silversalmongrille.com

• T. Paul’s Urban Café: 1119 Commercial St., Astoria; 503-338-5133

• Astoria Column: End of Coxcomb Drive (off 15th Street), Astoria; 503-325-2963

• Astoria Riverfront Trolley: 1 Basin St., Astoria; 503-325-6311

• Clatsop County Heritage Museum: 1618 Exchange St., Astoria; 503-325-2203, www.cumtux.org

• Columbia River Maritime Museum: 1792 Marine Drive, Astoria; 503-325-2323, www.crmm.org

• Flavel House Museum: 441 Eighth St., Astoria; 503-325-2203, www.cumtux.org

• J.O. Hanthorn Cannery: Pier 39, Astoria; 503, www .pier39-astoria.com

• Lewis and Clark National and State Historical Parks: 92343 Fort Clatsop Road, Astoria; 503-861-2471, www .nps.gov/lewi

• Liberty Theatre: 1203 Commercial St., Astoria; 503-325-5922, www.liberty-theater.org

NEXT WEEK: LEAVENWORTH, WASH.