One by one, residents were removed by force.Ĭhoy said it was a defeat that sent several activists into “a collective depression” that many didn’t snap out of for years.īut in the end, although the I-Hotel was razed, the developers were unable to move forward.įor many years, the space was a large hole in the ground, then a parking lot. 4, the evictions began.Ĭhoy said police on horseback broke up the “human barricade,” and then firefighters provided a ladder so police could enter the roof. 3, he rode his motorcycle around the hotel and had a feeling “something was up.”Īnd then at 3 a.m. It was a fight that began soon after students staged a strike that ultimately gave birth to Asian American ethnic studies at San Francisco State.Ĭhoy, 67, who now lives in Portland, said the residents had won a few mini-legal battles and it looked like they could stave off eviction. And here were these old-timers and then you find out they came here to work as laborers and seamen and now you find out they are being screwed over by ‘the man.’ So naturally all young people were outraged by this and wanted to do something about it.” “We just kept finding injustices everywhere. “We were all on the coattails of the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement,” Choy tells me on Emil Amok’s Takeout. But it was Curtis Choy’s documentary, “The Fall of The I-Hotel” that gives the residents’ perspective of the ten-year battle to preserve their homes against corporate developers. The images of police mostly on horseback storming the scene and then one-by-one carrying out the residents was captured on the news that night. They were mostly older Filipino men, many of whom had stayed in the residence hotel or used it as a home base since they arrived in the 1920s. 4, 1977, in a brutish display of force, San Francisco police went in and staged a mass eviction of the I-Hotel residents. 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. Manilatown was down to just one block, anchored by what would become the symbol of the Filipino community, a single room occupancy (SRO) joint, known as the International Hotel, or I-Hotel. Known as Manilatown, it was not a tourist trap, just a place Filipinos called home.īut by 1977, development was eating up real estate on Kearny Street. On the edge of Chinatown in San Francisco, Filipinos always gravitated to Kearny Street.
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