Crown Point and the Vista House

Seven hundred thirty-three feet above the Columbia River, on a promontory called Crown Point, stands a small octagonal building that may be the most dramatically situated rest stop in the American West. The Vista House was designed by Portland architect Edgar Lazarus in an Art Nouveau and Art Deco style, built between nineteen sixteen and nineteen eighteen, and dedicated on May fifth of that year. It was conceived as something more than a travelers' comfort station.

The idea came from Samuel Lancaster, the consulting engineer for the Historic Columbia River Highway. Lancaster wanted a viewing pavilion at Crown Point where drivers could stop and commune with the landscape in what he described as silent communion with the infinite. The Vista House Association, a group of fifty-two Portland businessmen and civic leaders, raised the funds to make it happen.

The building was officially dedicated as a memorial to Oregon pioneers, the men and women who had come overland on the Oregon Trail and by canoe down the Columbia River before any road existed here. The highway itself had begun construction in nineteen thirteen, the work of Lancaster and Multnomah County roadmaster John Yeon, a road designed as deliberately scenic rather than merely functional. Samuel Hill, who would later build his Stonehenge memorial upriver, was one of the advocates who pushed for a highway worthy of the Columbia Gorge's beauty.

From Crown Point you can see the gorge stretching east into Washington state, the river below, and on clear days the snow cone of Mount Hood to the south. The Vista House is now a museum and visitors center. Its exterior stonework, carved from local materials, gave it a permanence suited to the site. Lancaster said he wanted a building that would still be standing in a thousand years. More than a hundred years in, it looks well on its way.