The John Jacob Astor Hotel, originally known as the Hotel Astoria, is a historic former hotel building located in Astoria, Oregon, United States, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). It is one of the tallest buildings on the Oregon Coast and is a "prominent landmark" in Astoria. Constructed in 1922–23, the hotel opened in 1924 and initially was the city's social and business hub, but soon was beset with a variety of problems, and struggled financially for years. It was renamed the John Jacob Astor Hotel in 1951, but a decline in business continued, as did other problems. The building was condemned by the city for safety violations in 1968 and sat vacant for several years until 1984, when work to renovate it and convert it for apartments began. It reopened as an apartment building in 1986, with the lowermost two floors reserved for commercial use. The building was listed on the NRHP in 1979. The world's first cable television system was set up in 1948 using an antenna on the roof of the Hotel Astoria. History Construction began in November 1922 and was completed in late 1923, and the Hotel Astoria opened for business on January 1, 1924. At the start of construction, the plans called for the hotel to be five stories tall, but only a month later, on December 8, 1922, a fire destroyed almost all of downtown Astoria. The resulting severe shortage of housing prompted the Columbia Hotel Company to revise the design to increase the planned height to eight stories. The hotel was the tallest building in Oregon outside of Portland when completed and the tallest commercial structure on the Oregon Coast. Emporis gives its height as . It was eclipsed by the nine-story, Marshfield Hotel (now the Tioga Hotel), in Coos Bay, in 1926, when construction of that building's overall structure neared completion. However, work on the Marshfield was soon suspended, and the building stood vacant (its uppermost stories a windowless shell) until the late 1940s, when it was finally completed and opened for use for the first time, as the Tioga Hotel. Until the Tioga Hotel's opening in 1948, the Hotel Astoria remained the tallest commercial structure in use on the Oregon Coast. The building has an L-shaped footprint. On its most prominent side, the west façade, it extends the full length of the block on 14th Street between