The Astoria Column is our town’s most visible and universal symbol. If there is one thing that people everywhere might know about Astoria, it’s the Column, or perhaps Goonies or Kindergarten Cop.

It is great to have the Astoria Column back in business. For more than one year, visitors could not enter the Column, because its stairwell was deemed to be unsafe.

The engineering behind the replacement of the stairwell was utterly fascinating. We applaud the genius of those who planned the process of removing the old stairwell and installing the new.

The cost of the repair and replacement (approximately $585,000) was borne by the City of Astoria and Friends of the Column, the nonprofit group that paid for the Column’s restoration in 1995.

This repair would not have happened without the Friends’ fund-raising. They contributed $200,000 to the project. This kind of public-private partnership is a familiar thing these days. The City of Astoria does not have the financial resources to carry out the stairwell replacement. Nor was the city able to pay for the Column’s restoration.

For all of the good works carried out by Friends of the Column, the organization has its detractors, who disapprove of the Friends’ concept of a new visitors center. The Column has the highest visitor count of any attraction in the Astoria-Warrenton area. The Friends’ visitor center vision responds to that reality in a most sensible way.