Monument to Filipinos' legacy rises in San Francisco
'77 hotel standoff displaced many
SAN FRANCISCO -- It is among the most infamous chapters in this city's recent history: elderly immigrants forcibly evicted from their one-room tenement apartments and sent homeless into a street filled with protesters, police, and raucous confusion on a summer's night 28 years ago.
Two years after the evictions, the International Hotel was gone, demolished to make room for a parking garage that ultimately was never built.
For a quarter-century, the land on which the tenement stood, on the outskirts of San Francisco's financial district, remained vacant while its owners tried unsuccessfully to develop it and activists sought to reclaim it.
Now, rising from a corner of that same site on Kearny Street, near the base of the Transamerica Pyramid building, is a rebirth of the International Hotel, a gleaming new 14-story complex set to open in August that will house 104 apartments for low-income senior citizens and be home to the Manilatown Center, a community resource center that aspires to become the symbolic focal point for the 320,000 Filipino-Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area.
''I think it will, in some small way, be a place for pride within the Filipino community and is important for developing a kind of consciousness about our history -- and you can't do that without a place, a physical place," said Emil De Guzman, president of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation and a former tenant of the International Hotel.
The evictions were the culmination of a decade-long battle over the International Hotel, which was home to scores of aging farm workers, most of Filipino descent, and was the last trace of a once-thriving Manilatown that, over the years, had faded into the expanding shadow of skyscrapers and downtown redevelopment.
''Manilatown was obliterated, demolished and destroyed," said De Guzman, adding that the rebirth of the International Hotel and the accompanying community center serve as symbols of the Filipino community's perseverance and as a legacy to the tenants of the International Hotel, nearly all of whom have since died.
''To have a public place like that is important for the Filipino community," said De Guzman, because it helps future generations ''to understand the history of the Filipino community."
De Guzman, 57, who now works as a fair housing investigator and mediator for San Francisco's Human Rights Commission, was president of the tenants association when the authorities dragged him and others from the hotel.
Awakened by the tumult of the civil rights movement, De Guzman, then a college student in Berkeley, helped elderly tenants fight the evictions that began the battle in 1968. For nearly a decade, activists and the tenants resisted. After a failed attempt by city officials to help hotel residents buy the building, a judge ordered the city to enforce eviction notices.
Hundreds of protesters formed a human barricade around the hotel when Sheriff Richard Hongisto arrived with deputies and police on the night of Aug. 4, 1977. The authorities used a ladder from a fire truck to enter the building through fire escapes. Then they smashed doors. Defiant tenants were escorted out of the building, as protestors clashed with police who arrived on horseback and in riot gear.
''It's certainly the most distasteful thing I've had to do while I've been in office," Hongisto said at the time.
The International Hotel had become a rallying point for advocates of affordable housing and the rights of immigrants, as well as for a growing Filipino-American community that was galvanized by the struggles of the so-called ''manongs," the term of endearment and respect used by Filipino-Americans to describe the now-elderly forebears who began arriving from across the Pacific a century ago to work in fields, plantations, and canneries in California and Hawaii.
In San Francisco, a vibrant Filipino community sprouted in a 10-block expanse alongside Chinatown. As many as 20,000 people of Filipino descent lived in the district's low-rent apartments, including the I-Hotel, as the International was more commonly known. Pool halls, barbershops, nightclubs, small groceries, and restaurants sprang up in Manilatown.
But as the city's financial district expanded, Manilatown shrunk. Displaced by the new development, residents moved to other districts in the city or fanned out into other Bay Area communities. The I-Hotel became a last stand of sorts.
After the evictions, a neighborhood group that evolved into the Kearny Street Housing Corporation prevented commercial development from taking root at the site of the old hotel. The corporation tried to buy the property, but owners refused.
In 1994, the Catholic Diocese of San Francisco stepped in to buy the property to relocate a school damaged during an earthquake. The church agreed to allow a corner, at Kearny and Jackson streets, to be developed as low-income housing for senior citizens.
The city and federal governments funded the bulk of the construction project, which is nearing $30 million. About $1 million, raised through donations, is funding the Manilatown Center, a 2,400-square-foot facility that will occupy the bottom floor of the high-rise and serve as an homage to the neighborhood's history.
''Manilatown is rising again," said Estella Habal, a Filipino-American activist who took part in the 1970s protests and helped in the resurrection of the I-Hotel. It has taken years of struggle, including three previous failed attempts, Habal said, to get the project underway.
Now a professor of Asian studies at San Jose State University, Habal said the episode is an important part of immigrant history, not only for those of Filipino descent. While most of the hotel's tenants were Filipinos, there were Chinese immigrants and whites, too.
Jose Toledo, 31, another member of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, said, ''The whole story about the evictions gets a bit romanticized."
''The unfortunate thing is that when people focus on the evictions, they don't know that there's this whole other history. I think we need to see another side of the story, that we have people who lived at [the I-Hotel] and lived in this place called Manilatown and made the best of their lives." 