"The I-Hotel, officially known as the International Hotel, was built in 1907 and was a low-cost residential hotel located at the corner of Kearny and Jackson Streets in the Manilatown section of San Francisco. It was home to many Asian Americans, specifically a large Filipino American population.
The primarily Filipino population of immigrants living at the I-Hotel represented an area of Kearney Street in Chinatown known as San Francisco's Manilatown. Despite its full occupancy, during the urban renewal and redevelopment movement of the mid-1960s, the International Hotel was targeted for demolition. The first eviction notices were issued to residents in 1968, and began an almost 40-year battle spurring disagreements and debate among activists and public officials.
For years after the first eviction notices were served in 1968, many individuals were involved in the long fight that took place on the streets, in courtrooms, and in the everyday lives of the I-Hotel Manilatown residents. Some community characters involved in the struggle were Al Robles, Filipino-American San Francisco Poet, and at one point, controversial Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones. After Jones was appointed as Chairman of the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission, the Housing Authority voted to acquire the building using $1.3 million in federal funds and then to turn it over to tenants rights groups. When a court rejected that plan and ordered evictions in January of 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!" Sheriff Richard Hongisto, a political ally of Jones, refused to execute the eviction order, which resulted in Hongisto being held in contempt and serving five days in his own jail.
The final residents were evicted on August 4, 1977. In 1978, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein created an International Hotel Citizens Advisory Committee, which was unable to break the deadlock between low-cost housing advocates and the property owner. The building stood empty while the fate of the site continued to be debated, but was finally demolished in 1981.
In 1994 the site was acquired by the Roman Catholic archdiocese of San Francisco. The air rights was later sold to Chinatown Community Development Center which planned to build a replacement low-cost residential project. In 2003, construction began on the new I-Hotel, and the building was completed on August 26, 2005. The new building contains 105 apartments of senior housing. A lottery was held to determine priority for occupancy, with the two remaining living residents of the original I-Hotel given priority. 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." (
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