The original exterior color was mainly white, with gray on the first two floors. In its early years, the hotel was "the hub of the city's business dealings and social activities". In addition to 150 rooms for guests, the building included ten residential apartments on its top floor. The local chamber of commerce had its office in the hotel, and the basement included show space for salesmen. The hotel hosted many conventions, and several community groups used it as their regular meeting place. However, the hotel began to struggle financially within just a few years. It was beset with a variety of problems, involving "prohibition agents, liquor control officers, labor troubles and military police. The Army declared the area off-limits, and the Navy proclaimed it out-of-bounds," "The Daily Astorian" wrote in a 2011 retrospective article. The completion of the Sunset Highway in 1949 contributed to the decline in business, as it gave Portlanders a second route to the Oregon Coast, one not passing through Astoria. From the 1930s on, ownership of the hotel changed hands several times. In late 1951, the Hotel Astoria was renamed the John Jacob Astor Hotel, in honor of the city's namesake, John Jacob Astor. The landmark building was repainted pink. However, a postwar decline in business continued, and other problems persisted. In 1961, the Astoria Fire Department found 51 code violations, six of them major, but all of the violations remained uncorrected seven years later. The restaurant and "Fur Trader Lounge" bar were closed by the Internal Revenue Service in early 1968 for failure to pay taxes. In 1968, city officials condemned the building, declaring it a public nuisance and a fire hazard, and ordered it vacated. Except for a small Greyhound Lines terminal that was still operating in 1970, the building sat vacant for several years. A 1978 plan by the city to tear the building down was dropped when voters turned down a request for public funding to carry out the demolition. The Clatsop County government took ownership in 1978 through tax foreclosure and sold the building at auction in early 1979. During 1979, a group of local historians hoping to prevent further threat of demolition succeeded in an effort to get the landmark listed on the National Register of Historic Places. However, a succession of proposals to renovate and reopen the "derelict eyesore" failed to come to fruition. In 1983, a feature article about Astoria in "The Sunday Oregonian" referred to the Astor Hotel: "Formerly the pride of Astoria, the once-elegant inn now houses only frequent trespassers and serves as a haven for minor-in-possession juveniles with little to do on an Astoria Saturday night."