Mabel Robison bought The Clark Hotel in 1951, and for the next 25 years or so it was her “headquarters” and the nexus of the Robison-Bass household — headed by Mabel since her husband died in 1941. Mabel’s older brother John Hiram Bass lived at the Clark until he died in 1955 (?). Vern lived there for a while after he got out of the seminary and before he married. Other members of the family may have lived there, too, off and on.
The office was located on the ground floor to the right of the doorway with the awning. Mabel’s “apartment” (just a bedroom, a sitting room and a bathroom, if I remember correctly) was off the office (the windows just behind the black Cadillac). That caddy was Keith Robison’s.
I was told that the Clark was a kind of (a partially) residential hotel typical in the first half of the twentieth century in port cities up and down the Pacific coast — Vancouver and Victoria, B.C.; Seattle; Tacoma; Portland; San Francisco; etc. They were for men only. Seasonal work crews in various maritime industries; engineers and technicians at Boeing and other local industries; single men newly arrived in the Pacific Northwest for work; and even retired people lived at the Clark. Women could only be guests in the “spacious lobby” and the lounge with the piano and television, and the dining room, but they couldn’t access the upper floors where the bedrooms were. At least those were the rules. The office was situated at the top of a flight of steps from Minor Street (with a large, plate-glass window looking down on people entering through the main door), and sliding glass windows for service opposite the stairs giving access to the dining room below and the guest rooms above. The staircase was a large, open, wooden structure with a skylight at the top, making the lobby bright with natural light. It was also out of code, and I believe the city threatened Mabel for years about enclosing the stairwell, which was considered to be a fire hazard in such buildings. She never complied. Mabel did things her way, on her own time-table! I also remember a service staircase at the back of the building, and we children used to love running through the hallways up one staircase and then down the other.
This business card from the Clark lists some of the amenities. At the foot of stairs to the lowest level, before entering through the double-doors into the dining room, there was a large, polished wooden steering wheel with smooth, carved handles projecting out from each of the spokes. The whole thing could be spun at great velocity with an energetic shove. I used to imagine it came from a many-masted sailing ship, which is what it looked like. I later learned it was from a ferry boat my uncle Keith had bought and turned into a floating dry-dock on Lake Union. In the low-ceiling dining room were booths and tables, and a food line at the far end where guests consulted a menu on the wall, ordered through a window into the kitchen, and were handed plates of food for their self-service trays, which they carried to their tables. We loved coming to the Hotel as kids, and serving ourselves milk from the “mechanical cow” — a dispensing machine with a heavy lever we had to lift to fill a glass.
By the time Sam Robison bought the Clark Hotel from Mabel in 1973 (?), the era of a “men only” residential hotel was long past. He repurposed the property.