Stewart Hotel/Mary's Club

 

People who enjoy architecture often spend more time looking at the structure and details of a building while paying less attention to what occurs inside.  If you mention “Stewart Hotel” to most Portlanders, few could picture the building at 129 S.W. Broadway.

 But mention “Mary’s Club” and chances are they will know exactly where it is, thanks to its catchy blade sign and descriptive reader board.  All of which are indications that since the middle 1960s, Mary’s Club has been known as one of Portland’s earliest bars offering first topless and eventually all-nude dancing girls.

However, after 67 years the party is ending for Mary’s Club, at least at this location.  The three-story brick building with 57 now-vacant sleeping rooms above has been sold and will be demolished and replaced with something presumably bigger. 

Club owners say Mary's will move to a new downtown location -- as yet undisclosed -- and take the signs and interior artwork with them.  It remains a family business, operated by the heirs of Roy H. Keller, who bought it in 1955 and shifted to topless entertainment about a decade later.  His inspiration was a craze that was first ignited in San Francisco. 

Of course, many people objected to nude dancing as a form of entertainment.  A Portland newspaper columnist minimized it by writing, “When you’ve seen two, you’ve seen 'em all.”  However, an Oregon appellate court wiped away local attempts to regulate nude dancing by ruling that dancing was a form of communication protected by the state’s free-speech clause.

Keller died in 2006, at age 90.  Some 150 people showed for his funeral, including dancers, bartenders, other employees and friends.  Like an outpouring on Facebook when the club announced that it was forced to move, Keller’s funeral showed the lasting affections that can be formed by a family-run business that respects its workers and clientele.

 The three-story brick Stewart Hotel, meanwhile, apparently never had pretensions beyond being more than affordable habitation.  It was built when streetcars, including the Broadway Line, were a heavily-used means of transportation.  The building followed a common "streetcar architecture" pattern of ground-floor retail with housing above.  The simple cornice, lintels and sills were the same cream-colored brick as the walls.

Nobody famous (so far as we know) ever slept there.  The hotel was not an element in any important historical movement or involved in any significant ethnic involvement.  References to it in the newspapers over the decades mentioned it occasionally as the scene petty crimes and as the address of a a defendant being charged in court.  In its last years, it was home to low income tenants including the elderly and disabled.

 The Stewart may have reached a nadir in 2008 when its furnace boiler broke and tenants went 10 days without heat in December cold before a fix was accomplished.  The upper floors are now vacant, possibly as a condition of a sale.

 Demise of the Stewart is not likely to cause any public handwringing.  It can be dismissed as an old building, inadequately maintained, that outlived its usefulness and became an "opportunity site" for redevelopment.  It is regrettable, however, that we lose inventory of fixable affordable housing for low-income residents.   It is a sad reflection of our throw-away society that a building only 100 years old can be dismissed so easily.

----Fred Leeson

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