BAY AREA QUAKE : Hotel Offers Safe Harbor for Marina’s Homeless : Shelter: The plush Stanford Court checked in quake victims who desperately needed a roof over their heads.

You wouldn’t be able to tell them apart from the average well-heeled tourists who frequent San Francisco’s two five-star hotels.

But the 10 men and women dining on Nob Hill in the Stanford Court’s plush Blue Room Friday night--ignoring the television tuned to the World Series--were in fact some of the newest additions to San Francisco’s homeless population.

All were refugees from the earthquake-ravaged Marina District, referred by the Red Cross and city officials to the luxurious hotel, which set aside 25 free rooms for people like them seven days ago.

The Stanford Court’s total of 45 homeless, who range in age from 4 to 93, couldn’t have landed in a better place.

The 402-room hotel, which normally offers single accommodations for $180 to $300 a night, is built on bedrock. It weathered the quake without so much as a crack or a broken window.

And that fact was a welcome relief for these mostly upper-middle-class people, many of them elderly, who were only now coming to grips with the enormity of their loss.

If the temporary housing was plush, the accommodations were without frills. Hotel assistant manager Tony Moore said that, besides the room, they were being given two meals a day--the same food that employees receive--and free local calls. But room service, among other things, was out of the question.

“We’re trying to provide basic necessities--unglamorized,” Moore said.

But their time may be running out. “Unfortunately, we have to go back to the basics of making a buck and we may not be able to keep them here another week,” Moore said.

Henni Kuflik, 63, had lived in her Marina District apartment for 28 years, paying only $361 a month.

“The only thing occupying me since it happened is where I am going to live,” Kuflik said. Only a week ago, she said, she had dreamed of living in the apartment she had just remodeled--for $2,000--”until the time comes to leave this Earth.” Now, she says, “I hope to rent a motel (room) on Lombard Street”--a busy tourist strip that adjoins the Marina District.

Leonard H. Jacobson, an advertising salesman for a host of local newspapers, had paid less than $400 a month in his 11 years in the Marina District. He has lived in the hotel now for a week.

“I just want to find a place between now and Christmas,” said Jacobson during dinner, his back turned to the World Series on TV. “I’ve been looking for a place and the rents they’ve been asking make me realize how lucky I was.”

William T. Dougherty, a public relations man, tried to smile. “My father died two months ago from cancer. I had a coronary flare-up two weeks ago. Now I’m homeless. My life’s been so shaky, the earthquake’s smoothed it out,” he said.

The smile dissolved. He added, “All clowns cry on the inside.”