Overflow crowd marks 40th anniversary of I-Hotel evictions

A sizable crowd spilled from the entrance of the International Hotel Manilatown Center on Friday to mark the 40th anniversary of the night in 1977 when residents of the former International Hotel on Kearny Street, many of them elderly Filipino war veterans, were evicted so the hotel could be razed to make way for development in what was then the city’s Manilatown.

On Aug. 4, 1977, thousands of protesters and activists inside and outside the I-Hotel faced 300 riot-geared law enforcement personnel who raided the low-income, single-room-occupancy building to evict 50 or so elderly Filipino and Chinese residents.

The clash was the culmination of a nearly decadelong battle between the building’s corporate owner and a large grassroots movement determined to defend the senior residents and the building, which effectively stood as the last remnant of San Francisco’s former Filipino neighborhood.

A panel of “Original Defenders,” including De Guzman and Tau-Lee, recounted harrowing details of the night — the force with which officers swung batons, how the horse patrolmen charged the human barricade surrounding the SRO, squeezing the crowds against the hotel to near suffocation.

The anniversary event ended with a candlelight vigil around the Manilatown Center, located in the first floor of the new International Hotel, another low-income, senior housing development that was ultimately built on the site of the old demolished hotel.