Vista House: Silent Communion with the Infinite

When Samuel Lancaster, the consulting engineer who designed the Historic Columbia River Highway, chose the spot where Crown Point juts seven hundred thirty-three feet above the Columbia, he wrote that it was the ideal place for an observatory from which the river could be viewed, in his words, in silent communion with the infinite. He proposed building a structure there that would serve travelers as a rest stop while also memorializing the pioneers who had made Oregon. Construction began December twenty-ninth, nineteen sixteen.

The building that rose from that promontory was designed by Portland architect Edgar Lazarus and is unlike anything else along the highway. Lazarus gave it an octagonal stone tower in an Art Nouveau style with German Jugendstil touches. The interior is finished in marble. The windows are stained glass. When it was dedicated on May fifth, nineteen eighteen, the comfort station inside featured public restrooms finished with the same marble as the rotunda, and some Oregonians mocked the project as a one hundred thousand dollar outhouse.

Lancaster explicitly dedicated Vista House to the memory of Oregon's pioneers. The building was dedicated as a memorial to those pioneers, a purpose that sat oddly with the plushness of the building itself. But that contradiction was the point: the travelers who were about to cross the same mountains those pioneers had crossed deserved to arrive at something worthy of the journey.

Vista House sits on the National Register of Historic Places and is one of the most photographed structures in Oregon. On clear days the Columbia stretches east and west in a broad silver ribbon. The highway below switchbacks down through Douglas fir, and the gorge walls rise above it on both sides. Lancaster got the location right.