Международный отель: История филиппинского квартала в Сан-Франциско

Residential hotel in San Francisco

The International Hotel, often referred to locally as the I Hotel, was a low income single room occupancy residential hotel in San Francisco, California's Manilatown. It was home to many Asian Americans, specifically a large Filipino American population. Around 1954, the I Hotel also famously housed in its basement Enrico Banduccci's original "hungry i" nightclub. During the late 60s, real estate corporations proposed plans to demolish the hotel, which would necessitate displacing all of the I Hotel's elderly tenants. and the hotel was demolished in 1981. After the site was purchased by the International Hotel Senior Housing Inc., it was rebuilt and opened in 2005. It now shares spaces with St. Mary's School and Manilatown Center.

The I Hotel, originally established as a luxury location for travelers in 1854, relocated to Kearny Street in 1873 and was rebuilt in 1907 after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire. During the 1920s and 1930s, thousands of seasonal Asian laborers came to reside at the I Hotel. The communities and building around the I Hotel grew into a 10 block Filipino American enclave along Kearny Street known as Manilatown, the Manilatown section of San Francisco. During the 1960s, residents were able to rent a room in the hotel for less than $50 a month. This "urban renewal" that occurred in response to the end of World War II had destroyed the heart of the Fillmore District, San Francisco, and hundreds of homes and thousands of residents were displaced due to the city's plans to expand the downtown business sector. Ed Lee volunteered for the cause by working through the terms of various anti eviction agreements as an attorney for the Asian Legal Caucus. Asian American student activists from nearby University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco State University also joined the protests, volunteering to repair and repaint the I Hotel so that it remained habitable for tenants even as the Four Seas Investment Corporation failed to maintain basic utilities. When a court rejected that plan and ordered evictions in January 1977, the Peoples Temple provided two thousand of the five thousand people that surrounded the building, barricaded the doors and chanted "No, no, no evictions!" Within six hours, all 55 remaining tenants had been evicted. Subsequently, an $8.3 million grant from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development was awarded to facilitate development of low income housing. 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. Additionally, a new mural on the site of the new building by Johanna Poethig features Robles, Etta Moon, Bill Sorro, and other tenant activists, commemorating their struggle to preserve affordable housing in San Francisco.

Street Music (1981) is a film about a fictional eviction of a similar hotel in the Tenderloin. The hotel and its elderly Filipino tenants were in a scene in the 1982 indie film Chan Is Missing by Wayne Wang. The Fall of the I Hotel (1983) is a documentary written and directed by Curtis Choy that chronicles the fight for the I Hotel and its tenants' eviction. The documentary is narrated by Al Robles. The Manilatown Series (2005) is a series of documentaries and short films written and directed by Curtis Choy that traces the eventual rebuilding of the I Hotel. I Hotel (2010), a book by Karen Tei Yamashita, uses the I Hotel as a setting for many of the ten interconnected novellas that comprise the novel. "Save the I Hotel," a short story in author Lysley Tenorio's collection Monstress (2012), features a manong's memories of the I Hotel prior to eviction. Remember the I Hotel, a play based on Lysley Tenorio's "Save the I Hotel," was presented by the American Conservatory Theater in November 2015. In the sixteenth episode of the fourth season of Barney Miller entitled "Eviction", the plot was loosely based on the events that transpired in the hotel.