The I-Hotel lives again

ON AUGUST 26 last week, the International Hotel in San Francisco's Manilatown rose again from the rubble, 26 years after it was completely demolished and 28 years after its mostly Filipino manong tenants were forcibly evicted.

"It's been a long struggle," I-Hotel organizer Emil de Guzman told the San Francisco Chronicle. "In many ways it speaks to the injustice that we as a community suffered. It's like the phoenix rising up. "

The 15-story $29.2-M building includes 88 studios and 16 one-room apartments with spacious bathrooms, kitchenettes, community rooms for fellowship and educational programs and a rooftop garden.

There are 7,500 people on the waiting list for these low-rent subsidized units and tenants will be selected by lottery except for 12 people, a few of the surviving manongs who were evicted in 1977, who will be given priority.

The I-Hotel, as it was fondly known, was built a year after the 1906 earthquake. By the 20s and 30s, it had become the residential housing of choice of many of the 20,000 mostly male Filipino immigrants who were merchant marine seamen, or seasonal laborers in the farm valleys of California OR in the canneries of Alaska. It was right in the heart of a 10-block of corridor of residential hotels, pool halls, barber shops, restaurants and money remittance centers that became known as Manilatown.

There were few Filipino women in Manilatown as the ratio was about 14 Pinoys to 1 Pinay in America at the time. The ratio was actually worse because many of the Pinays were already married so the unmarried ones were extremely rare. Anti-miscegenation laws exacerbated the situation for the bachelor Pinoys especially after 1932, when the California Legislature specifically included "members of the Malay race" in the list of those who could not marry white women.

After World War II ended, San Francisco officials made plans to expand its downtown business sector especially around the Financial District, a few blocks south of Manilatown. Under the buzzwords of "Redevelopment" and "Urban Renewal," small businesses and residential hotels were torn down to make way for high-rises, a building boom that was spurred by the opening of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) which made it easier for suburban white-collar workers to commute to downtown jobs.

By the late 1960s, the 10-block corridor had been reduced to a single block with the I-Hotel remaining as the one residential hotel principally populated by Filipinos. It was just a matter of time.

In March of 1968, San Francisco's biggest landowner, Walter Shorenstein, bought the I-Hotel for $350,000 and presented plans to the City to construct a multi-level parking garage on the site. In September and October of 1968, Shorenstein issued notices to the 196 tenants of the I-Hotel to move out or be evicted. By December of 1968, eviction notices were posted at the I-Hotel, the first of eventually nine such notices that would be issued over the next eight years.

Filipino students at San Francisco State and at the University of California-Berkeley were the first to rally to stop the eviction of the I-Hotel tenants. These students were actively organizing to establish Filipino ethnic studies programs at their universities and learning about their history and culture fit right in with rallying to preserve their community.

Together with other community members, they organized the United Filipino Association (UFA), under the leadership of Rev. Tony Ubalde, Joaquin Legaspi and Violeta Marasigan. The UFA set up programs for the manongs and organized volunteers to clean toilets, mop the floors and otherwise spruce up the badly deteriorating building.

The publicity about the struggle of the I-Hotel tenants forced Shorenstein, a major player in Democratic Party politics, to agree to enter into a lease agreement with the UFA that would keep the tenants in the hotel. But before the lease could be signed, a fire broke out killing three tenants, scuttling the lease plan. Shorenstein issued another eviction notice. Community protests, however, stopped him once again.

It was in March of 1971 when I first arrived in San Francisco, barely 19 at the time, set to study at the University of San Francisco (USF) in the Fall. But instead of living with my uncle in the Sunset District, I decided to move into the International Hotel after talking to Emil de Guzman, Bill Sorro (who also lived at the hotel), and crusty manager Joe Diones.

Rent was $50 a month for a 10 foot by 10 foot room with a tiny closet and a puny faucet with running cold water. There was a common (cold) shower facility down the hall where I could queue up and a communal kitchen on the second floor, where I learned to cook.

My next door neighbor on the third floor was Felix Ayson, a kindly manong who had lived at the hotel off-and-on since 1928. Felix was my mentor as he taught me the history of what he and other manongs went through in the sugar cane fields of Hawaii, in the farm valleys of California, and in the canneries of Alaska.

I didn't have a TV in my room until my sister, Girlie, and my brother, Don, visited me in August of 1971 and took pity on their kuya, buying me a small TV set.

While living in the I-Hotel in June of 1971, I used my personal funds to publish a progressive monthly community newspaper called Kalayaan, which featured the activities in support of the I-Hotel. Among the co-founders of the paper were Ron Quidachay (now a Superior Court judge), Luz de Leon (founder of Pistahan), Nelson Navarro, John Silva, Bruce Occena, Emil de Guzman and Bill Sorro. Our editorial office was at the rear of the UFA office, thanks to Violeta Marasigan.

The continuing protests forced Shorenstein to enter into a three-year lease with the UFA, which promised to bring the building up to housing code standards within a year. When the UFA could not fulfill its promise, it dissolved and gave way to the International Hotel Tenants Association (IHTA) led by de Guzman.

After six months of living at the I-Hotel and partaking of the community activities there, I moved out and rented a larger room -- a block away on Commercial Street -- which had been vacated by Lillian Galedo, now the executive director of the Filipinos for Affirmative Action (FAA).

Two years later, Shorenstein sold the I-Hotel for $850,000 to a Thai businessman, Supasit Mahaguna, and his Four Seas Investment Corporation. Four Seas applied for a demolition permit but litigation and protests stopped it as well. In 1976, Superior Court Judge Ira Brown ruled in favor of Four Seas and ordered the eviction of the tenants.

Then San Francisco Mayor George Moscone tried to get the City to buy the hotel but Four Seas' selling price had risen to $1.3-M and the City didn't have the funds to buy it at that price.

The eviction order stuck, but the sheriffs still could not enforce it. More than 5,000 I-Hotel supporters had linked arms in January 1977 to stop the eviction, forcing the judge to issue another stay of eviction.

After months of protests and court hearings, a final order of eviction was issued. At 3 a.m. on the morning of August 4, 1977, 400 San Francisco police officers, in full riot gear, rushed the 3,000-strong barricade of I-Hotel supporters, breaking through the cordon of linked arms, forcibly evicting all the tenants, including Felix Ayson.

The police were led by Sheriff Richard Hongisto, who had spent 5 days in jail for initially refusing to evict the tenants.
After the tenants were evicted, the hotel was boarded up. Two years later, it was torn down completely.

In 1994, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, with the support of then Mayor Dianne Feinstein, purchased the property from Four Seas and made plans to build a new I-Hotel housing. $29.2-M was eventually secured from the federal government and other sources to build the new I-Hotel.

On August 26, 2005, the new I-Hotel opened at last. Within it, past the lobby, is the Manilatown Heritage Center, which honors the history of the I-Hotel struggle and the tenants who lived there. Among the photos in the Maria Banatao Hall exhibit is one of Felix Ayson, my mentor, who did not live long enough to see this day but whose spirit is still in the building.

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