The I-Hotel, officially known as the International Hotel, was built in 1907 after the devastating 1906 earthquake and was a low-cost residential hotel located at the corner of Kearny and Jackson Streets in the Manilatown

Little Manila

Little Manila is term that refers to a community with a large Filipino immigrant and descendant population.- California :...

 section of San Francisco. It was during the 1920s and 1930s when thousands of seasonal Asian laborers came to reside at the hotel.
It was home to many Asian Americans, specifically a large Filipino American

Filipino American

Filipino Americans are Americans of Filipino ancestry. Filipino Americans, often shortened to "Fil-Ams", or "Pinoy",Filipinos in what is now the United States were first documented in the 16th century, with small settlements beginning in the 18th century...

 population. By the late 1970s, the I-Hotel was almost all that was left of Manilatown

Little Manila

Little Manila is term that refers to a community with a large Filipino immigrant and descendant population.- California :...

.

"Urban Renewal" planning

The primarily Filipino population of immigrants living at the I-Hotel represented an area of Kearney Street in Chinatown known as San Francisco's Manilatown. Despite its full occupancy, during the urban renewal

Urban renewal

Urban renewal is a program of land redevelopment in areas of moderate to high density urban land use. Renewal has had both successes and failures. Its modern incarnation began in the late 19th century in developed nations and experienced an intense phase in the late 1940s – under the rubric of...

 and redevelopment

Redevelopment

Redevelopment is any new construction on a site that has pre-existing uses.-Description:Variations on redevelopment include:* Urban infill on vacant parcels that have no existing activity but were previously developed, especially on Brownfield land, such as the redevelopment of an industrial site...

 movement of the mid-1960s, the International Hotel was targeted for demolition. This "urban renewal" that was occurring in response to the ending of World War II had destroyed the heart of this section of San Francisco--The Fillmore District, west of downtown, hundreds of homes and thousands of residents were displaced due to the city's plans to expand the downtown business sector. It was an inevitable fact around this time that the I-Hotel was next in its decimation.

Eviction opposition

Along with the ten full blocks of low-cost housing, restaurants, barber shops, markets, clubs and other businesses that benefited the Filipino community of around 10,000 people being destroyed, the International Hotel was planned to be demolished next. In order for the city to demolish the building, they needed to evict all of the "old timers" that lived in the I-hotel. Due to the 50 dollars a month rent, many of the tenants were poor and the community that was based around this residence was all that they had. There were 196 tenants in the building that were ordered to leave in October of that same year.

For years after the first eviction notices were served in 1968, many individuals were involved in the long fight that took place on the streets, in courtrooms, and in the everyday lives of the I-Hotel Manilatown residents. Some community characters involved in the struggle were Al Robles, Filipino-American San Francisco Poet, and at one point, controversial Peoples Temple

Peoples Temple

Peoples Temple was a religious organization founded in 1955 by Jim Jones that, by the mid-1970s, included over a dozen locations in California including its headquarters in San Francisco...

 leader Jim Jones

Jim Jones

James Warren "Jim" Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip.Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in...

. After Jones was appointed as Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission, the Housing Authority voted to acquire the building using $1.3 million in federal funds and then to turn it over to tenants rights groups. When a court rejected that plan and ordered evictions in January of 1977, the Peoples Temple

Peoples Temple

Peoples Temple was a religious organization founded in 1955 by Jim Jones that, by the mid-1970s, included over a dozen locations in California including its headquarters in San Francisco...

 provided two thousand of the five thousand people that surrounded the building, barricaded the doors and chanted "No, no, no evictions!" Sheriff Richard Hongisto

Richard Hongisto

Richard D. Hongisto was a businessman, politician, sheriff and police chief of San Francisco, California, and Cleveland, Ohio.-Early life and education:...

, a political ally of Jones, refused to execute the eviction order, which resulted in Hongisto being held in contempt and serving five days in his own jail.

The final residents were evicted on August 4, 1977. In 1978, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein

Dianne Feinstein

Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein is the senior U.S. Senator from California. A member of the Democratic Party, she has served in the Senate since 1992. She also served as 38th Mayor of San Francisco from 1978 to 1988....

 created an International Hotel Citizens Advisory Committee, which was unable to break the deadlock between low-cost housing advocates and the property owner. The building stood empty while the fate of the site continued to be debated, but was finally demolished in 1981.

In 1994 the site was acquired by the Roman Catholic archdiocese of San Francisco. The air rights was later sold to Chinatown Community Development Center

Chinatown Community Development Center

Chinatown Community Development Center is an organization in San Francisco, California which formed in 1977 after the merger of the Chinatown Resource center and the Chinese Community Housing Corporation. The organization was started by Gordon Chin, who continues to serve as Executive Director, to...

 which planned to build a replacement low-cost residential project. In 2003, construction began on the new I-Hotel, and the building was completed on August 26, 2005. The new building contains 105 apartments of senior housing. A lottery was held to determine priority for occupancy, with the two remaining living residents of the original I-Hotel given priority. Occupancy started in October 2005, and the new building also contains a ground-floor community center and a historical display commemorating the original I-Hotel.

External links

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/ihotel/ User photographs documenting 30+ years of I-Hotel and its residents
• Manilatown Heritage Foundation, currently on the site of I-Hotel
• The Fall of the I-Hotel, documentary (1983, 2005)
• International Hotel SFGTV San Francisco APA Heritage Month, SFGTV (May 2007)