Crime and the Underworld

Crews for sale

Astoria was a sailor town, and its boarding houses were crew suppliers. A sailor ate, drank, and slept at the house on credit, and when a captain needed men, the house settled the debt by sending him to sea, willing or not: that was crimping. The fee the house took for each man, called blood money, ran twenty-five to fifty dollars a head, and sometimes a hundred and fifty. Mont Hawthorne, an Astoria resident who lived those years, remembered crimps knocking men down in the street. The trade was discussed in the town's own newspaper in 1882, and it is documented for this river, with Astoria addresses, in a University of Oregon thesis that stands as this page's research spine.

Source: “Shanghaiing and Crimping on the Lower Columbia River,” University of Oregon thesis (Scholars' Bank)

Also: The crimps' prices, as gathered at Tour Portland

Bridget Grant's boarding house

On the north side of Commercial Street, between 14th and 15th, Bridget Grant kept a seaman's boarding house for some thirty years, and the town's wicked-history record says she was well known by the locals for shanghaiing. In the late 1880s the Grant brothers joined Larry Sullivan of Portland in a crimping consortium, Sullivan, Grant Bros. & McCarron, that worked both ends of the river. The county historical society's own exhibit, “Vice and Virtue in Clatsop County: 1890 to Prohibition,” is the holder this record answers to, and the society's own entry stands at this page's foot.

Source: Astoria, most wicked place: the wicked-history record (Tour Portland), from the Clatsop County Historical Society's exhibit

Jim Turk's boarding house

Across the way, on the south side of Commercial between 15th and 16th, stood Jim Turk's Astoria boarding house; the ground is a furniture store's parking lot today. The Turk family business ran between Astoria and Portland, and when Jim Turk died in 1895, Larry Sullivan moved to gather the whole boardinghouse trade of both towns into his own hands. The houses were welfare and trap in the same building: a bed and a meal for a sailor ashore, and a debt that could put him back at sea against his will.

Source: Astoria, most wicked place: the wicked-history record (Tour Portland)

Also: The Sullivan monopoly, at Offbeat Oregon

She sold her own husband

Among the kidnapping accounts the University of Oregon thesis gathers from this river's record is one that needs no dressing: a boardinghouse keeper sold her own husband to a Liverpool-bound captain, for one hundred dollars. The record does not say whether he came back. It stands here as the thesis gives it, because the trade's whole nature is in it: nobody inside the house was safe from the house.

Source: “Shanghaiing and Crimping on the Lower Columbia River,” University of Oregon thesis (Scholars' Bank)

The janitor who got away

Not every attempt worked. The thesis also gathers the attempted shanghaiing of a church janitor, foiled by the Reverend George Grannis: a man whose absence would be noticed at once, and a minister willing to notice it in public. The houses preferred men nobody would ask after. The record of the ones who were asked after is shorter, and it is the side of the ledger this page is glad to print.

Source: “Shanghaiing and Crimping on the Lower Columbia River,” University of Oregon thesis (Scholars' Bank)

The brewery that prohibition closed

Prohibition's Astoria record stands in brick. John Kopp's North Pacific Brewing Company raised its complex in Uppertown in 1896, to designs by the Portland architect Emil Schacht, and the state's historic record dates the brewery's end to 1915, as prohibition came. The buildings did not die with the beer: they took a second life as a condensed milk plant, which failed, and in 1928 the old beer storage house was remodeled by the local architect John Wicks into Uppertown's fire station, which served until 1977. Brewery, milk plant, and fire station, in one set of walls.

Source: Oregon State Historic Preservation Office, historic site record