"What the building represents in terms of history is being the last vestige of Manilatown," said Bill Sorro, one of the activists who took up residence in the I-Hotel when it was threatened and a board member of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation.

"But the other thing is...what it now has come to mean to a large community of people. To the young who are being taught about the spirit of the I-Hotel, a spirit of people resisting and fighting back and saying 'No! We won't move, housing is a human right.' That's pretty strong stuff," Sorro said.

"It wasn't like the Wild Wild West but there was a thing (among us Filipino kids) like 'don't go down to Kearny Street,'" said Al Robles, a pony-tailed poet and community activist who was a key figure in the I-Hotel protests.

Manilatown to rise in San Francisco

In the shadow of San Francisco's financial district lies a monstrous hole in the ground, an ugly crater at the point where the money behind the dot-corn revolution runs up against historic Chinatown.

For visitors to the city and many locals, the hole has no special significance - it's just a big empty space that has been there as long as many can remember. But for others, it means much more.

There once stood the International Hotel, which housed mainly elderly single Filipino and some Chinese men who came to the United States looking for jobs in the 1920s and 30s and worked the fields and fish canneries of Northern California.

Sitting at the edge of the fast encroaching financial district, it was an obvious target for the wrecking ball that had already claimed most of what was known as Manilatown.

When eviction notices were first issued to hotel residents in 1969, it must have seemed like an open-and-shut case. But no one had counted on a community uproar that led to an eight-year fight against eviction - a movement that at one point had thousands forming a barrier around the block.

Once the hotel was razed in 1977, a city planning commission, reacting to the community outcry, was directed to ensure that anyone wanting to redevelop include affordable housing. As one project after another fell through, the site has remained empty for nearly a quarter of a century.

"What the building represents in terms of history is being the last vestige of Manilatown," said Bill Sorro, one of the activists who took up residence in the I-Hotel when it was threatened and a board member of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation.

"But the other thing is...what it now has come to mean to a large community of people. To the young who are being taught about the spirit of the I-Hotel, a spirit of people resisting and fighting back and saying 'No! We won't move, housing is a human right.' That's pretty strong stuff," Sorro said.

"It wasn't like the Wild Wild West but there was a thing (among us Filipino kids) like 'don't go down to Kearny Street,'" said Al Robles, a pony-tailed poet and community activist who was a key figure in the I-Hotel protests.

Interviews with Robles and others who were there paint a picture of a very different San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s.

From 1898, when the United States bought the Philippines after the Spanish-American war and later annexed it, to 1934, when the U.S. agreed to make the islands a Commonwealth on the way to independence, Filipinos enjoyed unrestricted travel to the U.S. as U.S. nationals. Many of them went to Hawaii and then landed in California.

Manilatown stretched 10 blocks along Kearny Street and was dotted with barber shops, pool halls, restaurants and single resident occupancy hotels with the I-Hotel at its center.

White growers came from far and wide to Manilatown with trucks to take on field workers for the season and Filipino prize fighters were all the rage.

Robles, who grew up with Sorro in the Fillmore district, a mainly black area where many Filipino families lived, remembers eating pickled pig's feet at the theaters and sipping 7-Up listening to Filipino jazz musicians. All that is gone without a trace.

Today, most Filipino-Americans live in neat tract housing out in Daly City, some 10 miles to the south, where they make up more than a quarter of the population. Their social center is the local shopping mall.

But on a sunny day in early August, a street in what was once Manilatown came alive again with the sights and sounds or young and old, blacks, whites. Asians and Hispanics, poets, folk singers, rappers and hip hop artists marking the 24th anniversary of the evictions.

They also came to celebrate the fact that the hole is finally about to be filled. A new building is due to go up that will include parking, a Manilatown museum and a new I-Hotel.

At the anniversary rally, a brick from the original I-Hotel that will go into the new building was handed around for everyone to pass their "vibe" on to it and get some in return.

Construction of the project, which involves the Archdiocese of San Francisco, the nonprofit developer the Chinatown Community Development Center and the Chinese and Filipino communities, is expected to start in the fall.

It's not a moment too soon for some in crowded Chinatown. For them, the crater of the I-Hotel only meant business opportunities squandered because of the antics of a handful of troublemakers.

"Do you know how much money has been wasted?" said one merchant, a 30-year veteran of Chinatown, with something close to a sob in his voice.

Although the historic district has been preserved, "you keep all these old buildings in Chinatown and Chinatown is dead (anyway)," he said