Editor’s Notebook: Bringing the past to life — a new feature

Published 9:49 am Friday, February 20, 2026

By Matt Winters — Regional editor

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Although they are unmistakably of their own era, modern color makes these women more real in some sense. I imagine they may have been making a short trip down Astoria’s plank and muddy streets to a wedding in about 1905. Their blue eyes are A.I.’s best guess based on their Northern European features. I’d like to nominate them as official spirits of the city.

This color image of two women in lace seated in a carriage is part of Astoria photographer Elmer Coe’s surviving archive of glass-plate negatives from just after 1900.

The late Mitch Mitchum, Astoria’s inspirational public works director, is credited along with Lloyd “Bud” Howell with the Coe collection’s preservation. It was discovered in a shed where vandals had wantonly destroyed many of the fragile plates. Those we still possess offer fabulous glimpses of long-ago lives. Using a large format camera, Coe and other photographers of the time were able to capture reality in stunning detail.

But they could not present color images like this one, which I created using Photoshop and Google Gemini artificial intelligence.

To impose my preferences on a black and white original is almost sacrilegious in the view of some professional news photographers. But to me, bringing modern enhancements to old photos brings them alive in ways more congenial to modern taste. These women’s photo isn’t “news,” but provides a vivid insight into one moment of life about 120 years ago in what was a hard-scrabble river port town.

I’d love to know their story and invite anyone who recognizes their great-grandaunts, or whoever they were, to tell us more about them. Personally, I find them completely beguiling and feel the pull of their charm across the decades. They bring to mind one of my favorite time-travel novels, “Time and Again” by Jack Finney, in which a man journeys back to 1880s New York City and falls in love.

The other photo presented in color here is a 1911 newsprint image of “Astoria’s First Areoplane Exhibition,” of which it was reported “Thousands witness birdman fly over Columbia River.” It is more problematic from the standpoint of capturing the past, in the sense that the original was fuzzy. A.I. required active curation on my part to come up with an approximation of how this Curtiss Model D “Pusher” might have looked on its historic flight.

I plan to make such enhanced images a routine feature on this page, giving this unique local content the space it deserves. If you have historical photos you’d like to feature, please email them to me at matthew.winters@dailyastorian.com. Likewise, if you have information to offer about the photos printed today or others in the future, please do write.