Baker City Tower

The Baker City Tower, a nine-story Art Deco hotel tower completed in nineteen twenty-nine, stands as a tall and confident piece of Depression-era civic design in the middle of eastern Oregon's high desert. Baker City had already passed its gold-rush peak by the time it went up, but the town was determined to hold its identity as a real city, not a fading camp. The tower's stepped profile and geometric ornament are identical in spirit to skyscrapers going up in Chicago and New York at the same moment, transplanted to a community of a few thousand people surrounded by sagebrush and mountains. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and anchors the Baker City commercial historic district, which contains one of the best-preserved collections of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century storefronts in the Pacific Northwest.