August 4th Commemoration

868 Kearny Street,San Francisco CA 94108

04 August, 2021

Description

Please join Manilatown for our 44th Annual August 4th Commemoration Please join Manilatown for a day of Remembrance of the 1977 International Hotel Eviction. 1-6pm: International Hotel Manilatown Center Gallery Hours featuring the Manilatown Archive photos of Eviction-era photographers Tony Remington, Chris Fujimoto, Fred Mar and Jim Dong6-7pm: Community Screening of Curtis Choy's "The Fall of the I-Hotel"7-8pm: Community Sharing of Stories inspired by the Manilatown Archive photographsIMPORTANT NOTE: In accordance with San Francisco's directive that all attendees of indoor public events must wear masks regardless of vaccination status, the Manilatown staff will be actively enforcing mandatory mask wearing during this public event from 1-6pm. URBAN RENEWAL “This land is too valuable to let poor people park on it.” So said Justin Herman, Executive Director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, in 1977 to give credibility to the “urban renewal” project in San Francisco that sought to buy up buildings and evict people who were poor, old, black and brown. In the Fillmore, it was known as the “negro removal” plan and in downtown San Francisco, the International Hotel of Manilatown, became the center of the movement against ideologies like those of Justin Herman. The longest eviction battle to date was one result of this movement. The commitment to affordable housing and the fight for social justice in the Filipino and Asian communities was another. The story of the I-Hotel is one of great significance as we enter a more modern era of gentrification in the city. THE "I-HOTEL" The International Hotel was a low-income residential hotel that became the most dramatic housing-rights battleground in San Francisco history. As a center for Filipino and Asian American activism in the 1970s, the building housed nearly 150 Filipino and Chinese seniors, three community groups, an art workshop, a radical bookstore and three Asian newspapers. The "I-Hotel" as it was more commonly known to the community, stood on the last remaining block of Manilatown, a once-thriving Filipino neighborhood that was gradually displaced by San Francisco’s expanding financial district. THE FALL AND RISE From 1968 to 1977, landlords of the hotel tried to evict the residents and build a parking lot. Resisting eviction for almost a decade, the tenants organized a mass-based, multiracial alliance which included students, unions and churches. During the final 3am eviction on August 4, 1977, over 3,000 people unsuccessfully defended the I-Hotel from hundreds of club-wielding riot police. The building was demolished in 1979, and it remained a vacant hole for over two decades. Thanks to a concerted effort by local neighborhood groups, the I-Hotel was rebuilt in 2005, providing 104 units of low-income senior housing and the International Hotel Manilatown Center to continue the legacy of Manilatown. The Commemoration of the I-Hotel Eviction is an important annual remembrance event for the Manilatown Heritage Foundation in which we invite the general public to be in community with us to recall the legacy of the I-Hotel Anti-Eviction Struggle and share memories of Historic Manilatown. For more information about our August 4th Commemoration, the International Hotel Manilatown Center or the Manilatown Heritage Foundation please contact u at [email protected]