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Aug. 26--Gordon Chin's hair in the 1970s was jet black, radiating the sheen of an LP record.

On Friday, silver-haired and battle worn, he stood before a grateful throng -- some old enough to remember his youth and others too young to know what a long playing record is -- and proclaimed a community victory more than a generation in the making.

"I waited 26 years to say these six words," Chin told the crowd of about 300 people gathered on the edge of San Francisco's Chinatown to celebrate the opening of the International Hotel Senior Housing, and the Manilatown Center, a community center named after a long-gone enclave of Filipinos. "Welcome to the new International Hotel!"

U.S. Sen. Diane Feinstein was mayor in 1978 when Chin, then a community activist, was part of the collective public outrage about the original I-Hotel and the eviction in 1977 of its tenants, elderly Filipino and Chinese immigrants. In 1979, the I-Hotel was torn down, slated for commercial development.

In a brief address, thanking the crowd for patience and perseverance, Feinstein joked about the faded color of Chin's hair.

It took the graying of a generation, six city mayors and numerous lawsuits to transform the giant hole where the I-Hotel once stood into a 15-story high-rise of affordable senior housing units. Chin is the executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, the non-profit group that owns the new International Hotel Senior Center.

Next month, about 7,500 seniors who have applied for the housing units will compete in an open lottery for 88 studio apartments and 16 one-bedroom units. The first tenants are expected in early October.

For Emil de Guzman, a former tenant of the I-Hotel and a community activist like Chin who fought for affordable senior housing to be built on the old site, the event was very special.

"We're back home," a beaming de Guzman told the crowd.

The narrow, cream-colored high-rise on the corner of Kearney and Jackson streets also houses a new Manilatown on the first floor, the community center that is de Guzman's life's work. He is the president of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, the non-profit group that will run the community center.

The original Manilatown was a 10-block area bordering Chinatown that served as a gathering spot for elderly Filipino immigrants who had come in the early 1900s to work in fields in Salinas, Watsonville, Stockton and Delano.

They were called the "manongs," a term of respect for elderly men in the Ilocano dialect. Most of the tenement buildings and shops in the original Manilatown were torn down in the development mania of the 1960s, but the International Hotel, built in 1906, remained home to the manongs and some Chinese seniors.

The 1977 evictions became a kind of civil rights struggle that galvanized Filipinos and other Asian-Americans.

Yesterday, hundreds of people, including seniors from the neighborhood, college students re-awakened to the community history of Filipinos and community leaders, stood in a line that snaked around the block, waiting to tour the facility.

Inside Manilatown Center, archival photos from the night in 1977 when I-Hotel tenants were evicted were on display.

Kelly Cullen, executive director of the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development, a community working to preserve low-cost housing for downtown's working poor, came across town to help celebrate.

"This is a very big deal," Cullen said. "The I-Hotel was the beginning of people for affordable housing."

"This has been an important symbol for the city," Chin said. "It showed us the importance of preserving housing and preserving communities."

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