Published Monday, August 7, 2000 in the San Jose Mercury News

Hope for a new Manilatown
S.F. anniversary of I-Hotel eviction focuses on planned residential complex

By: Alexis Chiu, (415) 477-3795
Mercury News

Each year local Filipinos gather to remember the day the heart of San Francisco's Manilatown stopped beating.

And so they did Sunday, 23 years after residents of the International Hotel--most of them elderly Asians--were forcibly evicted after waging an unsuccessful decade-long battle.

But at Jackson and Kearny streets, where the I-Hotel served as home and de facto community center, social club and town hall to Filipino and Chinese immigrants, there was a perceptible change in the pulse of the rememberers.

Instead of resentment over the evictions that effectively wiped Manilatown off the city map, they spoke of resuscitation.

"We want everyone to see this pit for the last time," said Emil DeGuzman, a former I-Hotel resident and head of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, looking at his onetime home, now an overgrown lot encircled by chain link and strewn with trash. "It's celebratory. We're getting toward the finish line."

DeGuzman was speaking of the International Hotel Senior Housing project, which is set to begin construction in the next year after several years of delays.

The planned complex includes 104 units of affordable housing for the elderly, along with an underground parking structure, a church, a school and a cultural center. It could open as early as 2004.

Today, the former hotel site is on the fringe of Chinatown and North Beach, surrounded by restaurants, massage parlors and liquor stores. The city's Filipino population--which numbered more than 88,000 in the 1990 census--has long since scattered.

And while most of the ousted tenants are no longer alive, activists like Estella Habal hailed the impending construction as a vindication for all who called the three-story I-Hotel home.

"This is a victory for the people," said Habal, a tenant organizer during the eviction struggle. But, she added, "Others are being displaced all over the city."

Indeed, the I-Hotel eviction--which made way for an office tower that was never built--became a national symbol of a struggle still being waged in other city neighborhoods.

"It's not over, and it will never be over until everyone has adequate housing," said the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church. "This hole is still here. We've got to make sure this will never happen again."

For roughly four decades, starting in the 1920s, Manilatown was home to rooming houses, restaurants, barber shops and pool halls where Filipinos worked, played and lived.

By the 1970s, the I-Hotel where the rent was $50 a month, was widely considered the last vestige of the once-thriving 10-block community.

In 1974, the investment corporation that owned the hotel received a demolition permit from the city, sparking a series of legal skirmishes that the corporation ultimately won.

On Aug. 4, 1977, 300 sheriff's deputies and police broke through a protest crowd and evicted the more than 50 tenants from the hotel. Many were retired field workers and war veterans.

"Once there was no hotel, there was no Manilatown," said Habal, the tenant organizer.

After 17 years of failed development plans, the owner agreed to sell the site for community use. In 1994, the Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded a $7.6 million grant to develop the 15-story residential site.

While it won't bring back Manilatown, the building will mark a huge victory for the community, said Gordon Chin, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center.

In 1996, the San Francisco Planning Commission approved designs for the 15-story complex, but construction has been held up since then by such processes as obtaining permits and hammering out funding.

"It has been really slow, and we're all frustrated," said Chin, one of the site's developers. "But it will happen."