The International Hotel: The Night 400 Police Evicted Filipino Elders from San Francisco
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UGAT CLOTHING · HISTORY · FAHM SERIES
Post 3 · The International Hotel: The Night 400 Police Evicted Filipino Elders from San Francisco
On August 4, 1977, at 3:00 in the morning, San Francisco deployed 400 riot police, mounted patrols, and anti-sniper units to remove elderly Filipino and Chinese tenants from a single residential hotel. A human barricade of 3,000 people tried to stop them. They failed — but what they built in nine years of resistance changed Asian American history forever.
UGAT CLOTHING · HISTORY · FAHM SERIES
There is a corner in San Francisco — Kearny Street and Jackson — where a story happened that most Americans have never heard. It is a story about elderly Filipino men in small rooms. About nine years of resistance that should not have been possible. About a night in August when the city sent horses and ladders and sledgehammers against people whose average age was over seventy.
It is one of the most dramatic moments in the history of Asian Americans in the United States. And for the Filipino community, it is something more than history. It is a wound, and a victory, and a reminder — that their right to exist in this city was never freely given. It was fought for, inch by inch, year by year, in the courts and in the streets and in the hallways of a three-story red brick building called the International Hotel.
This is the story of the I-Hotel.
The International Hotel Collection
The I-Hotel fight is one of the most important moments in Filipino American and Asian American history. The International Hotel Collection at UGAT keeps that memory alive — worn, visible, and unsilenced.
Manilatown: The World That Came Before
To understand the I-Hotel, you have to understand Manilatown — because by the time the eviction crisis began, Manilatown was already almost gone.
For decades, the stretch of Kearny Street in San Francisco between Chinatown and the Financial District had been the center of Filipino life in the Bay Area. Manilatown, as it was known, spanned more than ten blocks at its peak — a dense, living community of barbershops, pool halls, restaurants, labor halls, and single-room-occupancy hotels where Filipino men who had come to California to work the fields, the canneries, and the merchant ships could find community, food, and a place to sleep.
The men who lived there were, by the 1960s and 1970s, old. They were the Manong generation — the first great wave of Filipino immigrants who had arrived in the 1920s and 1930s. Many had never been able to marry under California's anti-miscegenation laws, which had forbidden Filipinos from marrying white women. Many had worked their entire lives in agriculture or domestic service for wages that allowed them no savings. The I-Hotel — where a room could be rented for less than $50 a month — was not just housing. For many of these men, it was the only home they had ever known in America.
And by 1968, the city wanted it gone.
What Was Manilatown?
🗺 Location: Kearny Street, San Francisco — between Chinatown and the Financial District
📅 Peak years: 1920s–1960s, when tens of thousands of Filipino workers passed through or settled in the Bay Area
🏠 What it contained: Hotels, restaurants, barbershops, pool halls, labor union halls, bookstores, and community organizations — all within walking distance of each other
💔 What happened to it: Urban renewal, freeway projects, and Financial District expansion steadily demolished Manilatown block by block through the 1950s and 1960s. By 1968, only a single block remained — anchored by the International Hotel.
🏢 The I-Hotel was the last remnant of a community that had taken generations to build. When the eviction notices arrived, the tenants understood: this was not just about their rooms. It was about whether Manilatown would exist at all.
1968: The First Eviction Notices
In the autumn of 1968, the owners of the International Hotel — the real estate company Milton Meyer & Company — sent eviction notices to the building's 150 tenants. The plan was demolition. In the owner's words, the hotel was "a slum," and the land beneath it was far more valuable as a parking garage or a financial district expansion than as low-income housing for elderly Filipino and Chinese residents.
The notices landed in the middle of a city and a country already electrified by protest. The Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, the farmworker strikes in Delano — all of it had created a generation of young Filipino American activists who were organized, radicalized, and ready to fight. Filipino students from San Francisco State and UC Berkeley — some of them directly connected to the Third World Liberation Front strikes that had just won the creation of Ethnic Studies departments — descended on the I-Hotel.
On November 27, 1968, the tenants and their supporters refused to leave. They organized the United Filipino Association (UFA), which later became the International Hotel Tenants Association (IHTA). They held meetings, signed petitions, flooded city hall, and built a coalition that would eventually include labor unions, civil rights organizations, religious groups, student activists, and community members of every background.
What followed was nine years of extraordinary resistance.
Nine Years of Resistance: 1968–1977
The I-Hotel struggle was not a single dramatic confrontation. It was nine years of grinding, creative, multi-front resistance — in courtrooms, in city hall chambers, in the streets, and inside the building itself.
1968
Milton Meyer & Co. issues eviction notices. Tenants refuse to leave. The United Filipino Association forms to coordinate resistance. Students from SF State and Berkeley begin mobilizing in support.
1969
Community activists successfully negotiate a three-year extended lease from Milton Meyer. The Kearny Street Workshop, the first Asian American arts organization in the country, takes space in the I-Hotel basement. Everybody's Bookstore — the first Asian American bookstore in the nation — opens in the building. The I-Hotel becomes a cultural and political hub.
1973
Milton Meyer sells the property to the Four Seas Investment Corporation, a Thai-Chinese conglomerate. New eviction notices are served. The struggle intensifies.
1974–76
Mass rallies draw thousands. The I-Hotel becomes a cause célèbre of the Asian American movement — linked to anti-war activism, anti-Marcos organizing, labor rights, and housing justice. Delegations visit from across the country. Poets, artists, and musicians embed themselves in the building. The community inside the I-Hotel is as much cultural as residential.
Jan 1977
A San Francisco court orders eviction. Sheriff Richard Hongisto refuses to enforce it. He is held in contempt of court and serves five days in his own jail rather than remove the tenants. The image of the sheriff who went to jail to protect Filipino elders captures the nation's attention.
Spring 1977
The California Supreme Court upholds the eviction order. The legal options are exhausted. The community prepares for a final stand. Mayor George Moscone quietly leaves town so as not to be present when the eviction finally occurs.
Aug 3, 1977
Filmmaker Curtis Choy rides his motorcycle around the hotel. Something feels different. Word spreads through the community network. People begin gathering through the night.
August 4, 1977: The Night They Came
At 3:00 in the morning, they came.
Over 400 San Francisco riot police, mounted sheriff's deputies on horseback, anti-sniper units, and fire department ladder trucks converged on the corner of Kearny and Jackson. They cordoned off the surrounding streets. They took positions. And then they moved against the building.
Outside, a human barricade of 3,000 people had locked arms around the I-Hotel — four layers deep — chanting, singing, and refusing to move. Inside, over 100 tenants and supporters had barricaded themselves in the upper floors. The city had deployed a force more appropriate for a military operation than the eviction of elderly residents in their seventies.
The mounted police came down Kearny Street first. Eyewitnesses described the scene as "like the Roman legions." Horses pushed into the crowd. People were knocked down, trampled, struck with batons. The human barricade, after hours of holding, was broken.
When the crowd could no longer block the entrance, the police did not go through the front door. They used fire department ladders on the adjacent buildings, climbed to the roof, and broke through from above. Sheriff Richard Hongisto — who had gone to jail rather than enforce this order six months earlier — was photographed using a sledgehammer to break down tenants' doors.
One by one, the tenants were carried out. Some walked. Some could not. Felix Ayson, a 79-year-old Filipino tenant who could no longer walk or hear, was one of the last to leave. Assisted by two supporters, he told a reporter on the street: "I think my end is very near from this beautiful world."
Within six hours, all 55 remaining tenants had been removed. The oldest Filipino community institution in San Francisco had been emptied.
"The eviction on August 4, 1977 at 3:00 AM in the morning was a government action abhorred by many to be the most offensive in San Francisco history."
— International Hotel Citizens Advisory Committee, official history
Remember the I-Hotel
The night of August 4, 1977 is not forgotten. The International Hotel Collection carries the names and the memory of the tenants who were carried out of their home that morning — and the thousands who stood outside trying to protect them.
Why This Was Not Just an Eviction
The I-Hotel eviction was not, in any narrow sense, about housing. It was about the right of a community to exist — to occupy space, maintain culture, and be seen as human beings whose lives and histories mattered in a city that had profited from their labor for generations.
The Filipino men who lived in the I-Hotel were not anonymous. They were farmworkers who had picked crops in the Central Valley. Cannery workers who had spent summers in Alaska. Merchant sailors and domestic workers. Men who had been barred by law from owning land, from becoming citizens, from marrying outside their community. Men who had survived the Delano Grape Strike, the anti-Filipino riots of the 1930s, the Bataan Death March. Men who had served in the U.S. Army and been denied their veterans' benefits.
Their lives were full of things that had been taken from them. The I-Hotel was the last of it. And that is why 3,000 people stood outside that building at three in the morning — not because they were told to, but because they understood that what was happening was a continuation of a very long story about who gets to belong in America and who doesn't.
"The I-Hotel was the last remnant of Manilatown. It became kind of like a political touchstone because, you know, it was the last block."
— Estella Habal, historian and I-Hotel activist, San Jose State University
The coalition that defended the I-Hotel was as broad as the cause demanded. Filipino and Chinese tenants. Filipino American student activists. Japanese Americans who recognized in the eviction an echo of wartime internment. African American community organizations, including members of the Black Panther Party. Labor unions, including the ILWU and the United Farm Workers. LGBTQ organizations. Religious groups from Glide Church to People's Temple. Independent leftists. Poets. Artists.
For a moment, in that building and on that street, a coalition of people who had all been told in one way or another that they did not fully belong — stood together and said: this is where we belong.
After the Eviction: The Long Road Back
After August 4, 1977, the I-Hotel stood empty. It was demolished in 1979. For years, the site at the corner of Kearny and Jackson was a hole in the ground, then a parking lot — a scar in the cityscape that the community refused to let the city forget.
The tenants scattered. Some moved in with family. Some were placed in other hotels. Many of the elderly Manongs — who had lived in the I-Hotel for decades — did not survive long after losing their community. Within a year or two of the eviction, many of the older tenants had died. The human community that had sustained them, the daily rituals of life in a place that knew their names — that was gone, and it could not easily be rebuilt.
Jeanette Gandionco Lazam, one of the younger tenants who had fought alongside the Manongs, described the aftermath: "That community that we once had totally disintegrated. Within a year or two, many of the older tenants passed."
But the community did not give up on the site. For 27 years — longer than the original struggle — activists, former tenants, and community organizations fought to ensure that affordable housing would be built where the I-Hotel once stood. They lobbied city government, organized politically, and raised funds. In 1994, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded an $8.3 million grant for affordable senior housing on the site. In 2005 — twenty-eight years after the eviction — the new International Hotel Senior Housing opened at 848 Kearny Street: 104 units of affordable housing for low-income seniors, with a community center and the Manilatown Heritage Foundation housed on the ground floor.
In 2021, Jeanette Gandionco Lazam — by then the last surviving former tenant still able to return — moved back in. "Coming home," she said. "I never thought I'd utter those words."
The I-Hotel: Then and Now
📍 Address: 848 Kearny Street, San Francisco, CA — corner of Kearny and Jackson
🏚 Original building demolished: 1979
📭 Site used as: Vacant lot, then parking lot, 1979–1997
🏗 New building constructed: 1997–2005
🏠 New I-Hotel opened: 2005 — 104 units of affordable senior housing
🏛 Ground floor: Manilatown Heritage Foundation and community center
📽 Documentary: The Fall of the I-Hotel (1983), directed by Curtis Choy
📚 Book: I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (2010) — finalist for the National Book Award
The Legacy of the I-Hotel
The I-Hotel struggle created organizations and leaders that shaped Asian American civic life for generations. The Chinatown Community Development Center, the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, the Kearny Street Workshop — all emerged directly from the networks built in those nine years of resistance. The legal strategies developed for the I-Hotel influenced housing advocacy across California. The model of multi-ethnic, cross-issue coalition-building that the I-Hotel movement pioneered became a template for progressive organizing in San Francisco and beyond.
But the legacy is also personal and cultural. The I-Hotel struggle was the moment when Filipino American identity — distinct from other Asian American identities, rooted in a specific history of colonialism, migration, and labor — found its most visible public expression in the United States. The poets, artists, and community organizers who gathered in that building produced art, literature, and political thought that shaped what it meant to be Filipino American in the late 20th century.
The Kearny Street Workshop — born in the I-Hotel basement — became one of the most influential Asian American arts organizations in the country. The community newspapers, the cultural events, the poetry that came out of that building live on in archives, in family memories, in the work of writers and artists who trace their lineage back to those years on Kearny Street.
The I-Hotel is why Filipino American History Month matters. It is why Manilatown Heritage Foundation exists. It is why the corner of Kearny and Jackson is sacred ground to everyone who knows this history.
"Just as the Stonewall Inn is important to the national LGBTQ community, the I-Hotel deserves an important place in the hearts of all Asian Americans."
— Emil Guillermo, journalist and AALDEF contributor
Why This Story Belongs in Every Filipino American Home
The I-Hotel story is not comfortable. It does not end with full victory. The tenants were evicted. Most of the Manongs died without returning to their home. The building they had lived in was demolished.
But the story did not end on August 4, 1977 — and that is the point. The community kept fighting for twenty-eight more years. They won back the site. They built new housing. They preserved the memory. They turned a defeat into a foundation.
For Filipino Americans today — especially those in the Bay Area, where gentrification continues to displace communities of color from the very neighborhoods Filipino workers built — the I-Hotel is not ancient history. It is a living lesson about what organized community resistance looks like, what it costs, and what it can achieve even against overwhelming force.
And for every Filipino American anywhere — in California, across the country, and in the diaspora — the I-Hotel is a reminder that this community's presence in America was never simply given. It was carved out, defended, and fought for by people who had every reason to give up and didn't.
Their names were Wahat Tampao. Felix Ayson. Emil de Guzman. Jeanette Gandionco Lazam. And all the Manongs who lived and died in rooms on Kearny Street, whose names history barely recorded, whose lives shaped the city that evicted them.
Know their story. Carry it. Wear it.
Carry the I-Hotel Forward
The Manongs of the International Hotel were not defeated — they were the foundation. At UGAT, we design to make sure their story stays visible. Wear it into every room you enter.
International Hotel Hoodie →International Hotel TeeMakibaka CollectionFilipino American History CollectionBayani Collection
848 Kearny Street
The new International Hotel opened in 2005. It stands at 848 Kearny Street — the same address, the same corner, where the old building stood for over a century. Inside, seniors live in affordable housing. Downstairs, the Manilatown Heritage Foundation preserves the history of the community that once filled ten blocks of that neighborhood.
It is not everything that was lost. Nothing could be. The Manongs who were carried out of the building in 1977 are gone. The community that filled Manilatown across its best decades cannot be reconstituted. The ten blocks of Filipino life that urban renewal erased are gone.
But the address is the same. The community fought for that. For twenty-eight years after the eviction, they refused to let anyone else define what that corner would become. And in the end, they decided: affordable housing for seniors. A community center. A heritage foundation. A place that says: Filipinos were here. Filipinos are here. We are not leaving.
That is the I-Hotel. That is what nine years of resistance and twenty-eight years of aftermath produced. That is what it means to fight for a place in the world — not just for yourself, but for everyone who comes after.
💬 Join the Conversation
Does your family have a connection to Manilatown, to the I-Hotel, or to the Bay Area Filipino community? Did you know about the I-Hotel fight before reading this? Share your story in the comments — this history belongs to everyone who carries it.
📖 Part of the FAHM Series: "Mga Bayani ng Kasaysayan"
This post is part of our Filipino American History Month series exploring the figures and moments that shaped the Filipino American story.
The International Hotel
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