The Goonies House in Astoria: Its History, the 2015 Closure, and How to See It Respectfully

The house the Goonies set out to save is a real one, and people still live in it. It stands on a hillside at the east end of Astoria, Oregon, the river town where the Columbia meets the Pacific, and it played the Walsh family home in Richard Donner's The Goonies, which opened on June 7, 1985. Chris Columbus wrote the screenplay from a Steven Spielberg story about a gang of kids in the "Goon Docks" trying to keep their homes from being foreclosed on to make room for a country club. Forty years later it is still a private home. You can look at it from the public side, and that is where a visit ends.

We first wrote about the house in 2018, when it was shut to fans. It has since reopened, changed hands, and picked up a new set of rules, and a few things in our first version were wrong.

The parcel record and the map pin are on The Goonies House profile on Velvet Ropes. Nothing on either page changes the rule that runs through this one: it is somebody's house.

The house before the film

Oregon's historic sites inventory, kept by the State Historic Preservation Office, files the building under an older name, the Steffensen House, and dates it to about 1896. It is a Queen Anne, the ornate Victorian style of that decade, and the survey describes fishscale shingles, a hip roof, and a wraparound porch set on wood brackets and spindlework. Portland Monthly also gives 1896. The Clatsop County tax roll puts the year built at 1914. The state survey records a historic two-story addition on the east side, which could explain the later date, though no record we read says so.

The same inventory reads like a small census of working Astoria. City directories place a teamster for the Astoria Box Company in the house in 1896, then an engineer for Astoria Electric from 1902 to 1910. From 1925 to 1938 a watchman at a spruce mill lived here with his family. None of them was famous, and that is the house the film borrowed: an ordinary family place on a hill above a river town that worked for a living.

A treasure, but not a national one

Our 2018 headline called the house a national treasure. It holds no national designation. It has never been added to the National Register of Historic Places, and it sits east of Astoria's three historic districts that are on the Register: Astoria Downtown, Shively-McClure, and Uniontown-Alameda.

What it does carry is a rating from a 2013 survey of its part of town, which judged it eligible and contributing. In plain terms, the surveyors found it old enough and intact enough to count toward a historic district if one were ever drawn around it. None has been, so the rating is a surveyor's opinion on file with the state, and it puts no limits on the house.

Fourteen years of visitors, then blue tarps

The previous owner bought the house in 2001. For 14 years she let fans photograph it and sometimes brought them inside, according to The Daily Astorian, and the crowds grew every summer. By 2015 the paper estimated 1,200 to 1,500 visitors a day, and NBC News put it at about 1,500. The film's 30th anniversary that June drew an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people to town. City Councilor Russ Warr told The Daily Astorian that tourism at the house had "absolutely exploded" in three or four years.

In mid-August 2015 the house went under blue tarps and was closed to visitors. The Daily Astorian reported trespassing, vandalism, and threatening behavior. The sign at the foot of the approach, "Access closed to Goonies house," was the city's, according to the paper, though Warr conceded that as long as the road stayed a city street, the city could not stop anyone walking up it.

Reopened, then sold to a fan

The closure did not hold. Willamette Week reported in August 2022 that the owner had reopened the house to foot traffic in July 2021, asking people to walk up rather than drive. The visitors, she told the paper, "seem to be a lot better than what was here before."

The house changed hands at the start of 2023. OPB reported that the buyer was a lifelong fan from the Kansas City area, who told the station he bought it "to share it with the world. As long as Goonies are respectful." He also told OPB that legal limits rule out short-term rentals, a museum, or any other commercial use at the address. The Clatsop County tax roll names the owner of record as Goonies House LLC, and two neighboring lots on the same roll belong to companies named for lines and characters in the film.

The neighbors' side of it

Reopening brought the crowds back, and not only in summer. OPB reported in May 2023 that traffic on the hill had risen two to three times since the sale and now ran all year. The streets up there are steep, narrow, and dead-ended, with a gravel drive serving a few homes, so every car that comes up has to turn around in someone's driveway. About 70 residents came to a neighborhood meeting called by the Astoria-Warrenton Area Chamber of Commerce, where executive director David Reid set out three steps: tell visitors what to expect before they arrive, add signs and parking changes, and keep enforcement as the last resort.

The stakes for the town are real. About one in six people at the Astoria visitor center name the film as the reason they came, according to Portland Monthly.

How to see it without trespassing

OPB reported in 2023 that the owner encourages fans to come. His rule, as the North Coast's local coverage of the 40th anniversary put it in June 2025, is that fans are welcome to look at the house but should not drive up the driveway. The chamber's visitor guide asks you to park a few blocks away where it directs, photograph from the public sidewalk, keep the visit short and quiet, come in daylight, take your litter with you, and leave your pet in the car. It is explicit that the porch, the neighbors' yards, and their driveways are private property.

You do not have to go up the hill at all. Travel Oregon's guide to the film's 40th anniversary suggests viewing the house from a distance, from the East End Mooring Basin on the Astoria Riverwalk, out of respect for the owners and their neighbors.

Getting inside is the owner's call, not a standing offer. For the 40th anniversary the owners opened the doors for a limited number of tours, with the proceeds going to the film museum's planned expansion, Portland Monthly reported. Do not plan a trip around the next one.

Where else fans go in Astoria

Most of what fans come for is on public ground. The Fratelli jailbreak that opens the film was shot at the old Clatsop County Jail, built in 1913 and used as a jail from 1914 to 1976. Since 2010 it has been the Oregon Film Museum, run by the Clatsop County Historical Society, with a gallery of Goonies memorabilia in the cells and a Historic Oregon Film Trail marker for the film outside. The Flavel House Museum, where Mikey Walsh's father worked in the film, is a separate building.

The caverns are the one set you cannot visit in Oregon. They were built on a soundstage at Warner Bros. in Burbank.

What we got wrong in 2018

Our first version gave the release date as November 29, 1985; the film opened on June 7. It said the Oregon Film Museum used to be the Flavel House Museum. They are two buildings, and the museum is the old jail. It credited the "Access closed" sign to the homeowner, where The Daily Astorian credits the city. And it called the house off limits for good, six years before it reopened.