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.
