• INTERNATIONALHOTEL-01AUG1977-SE - SFPD carries away tenants in front of the International Hotel. Photo by Sue Ehmer Photo: Sue Ehmer
Photo: Sue Ehmer
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INTERNATIONALHOTEL-01AUG1977-SE - SFPD carries away tenants in front of the International Hotel. Photo by Sue Ehmer
INTERNATIONALHOTEL-01AUG1977-SE - SFPD carries away tenants in front of the International Hotel. Photo by Sue Ehmer
Photo: Sue Ehmer
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ihotel_070_mac.jpg James with the view of the City from his 14th floor apartment. James Walsh was a resident of the International Hotel back in the 70's, he has returned to the newly built hotel. Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the eviction of tenants, mostly retired Filipino and Chinese immigrant workers, from the International Hotel on Kearny Street. Galvanized by the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1970s, activists in what was then known as Manilatown made a decade long stand against the evictions through court proceedings and street demonstrations, which culminated in a violent riot scene on Aug. 4, 1977, as police raided the place and carried tenants out. Photographed in, San Francisco, Ca, on 8/2/07. Photo by: Michael Macor/ The Chronicle Mandatory credit for Photographer and San Francisco Chronicle No sales/ Magazines Out less
ihotel_070_mac.jpg James with the view of the City from his 14th floor apartment. James Walsh was a resident of the International Hotel back in the 70's, he has returned to the newly built hotel. Saturday marks ... more
Photo: Michael Macor
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ihotel_116_mac.jpg The windows of the soon to be open Manilatown Heritage Foundation Museum, inside the iHotel are covered with photographs from the 70's when the evictions protest were in full swing. Saturday marks the 30th anniversary of the eviction of tenants, mostly retired Filipino and Chinese immigrant workers, from the International Hotel on Kearny Street. Galvanized by the Civil Rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1970s, activists in what was then known as Manilatown made a decade long stand against the evictions through court proceedings and street demonstrations, which culminated in a violent riot scene on Aug. 4, 1977, as police raided the place and carried tenants out. Photographed in, San Francisco, Ca, on 8/2/07. Photo by: Michael Macor/ The Chronicle Mandatory credit for Photographer and San Francisco Chronicle No sales/ Magazines Out less
ihotel_116_mac.jpg The windows of the soon to be open Manilatown Heritage Foundation Museum, inside the iHotel are covered with photographs from the 70's when the evictions protest were in full swing. Saturday ... more
Photo: Michael Macor
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IHOTEL04_076_LH_.JPG Emil DeGuzman, board president of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, holds up a shirt made for the 30th anniversary of the International Hotel evictions of mostly retired Chinese and Filipino immigrant tenants in August of 1977. Police had to breach a human barrier of several thousand people to reach the hotel and enforce the evictions. Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle/San Francisco/8/2/07 **Emil DeGuzman cq �2007, San Francisco Chronicle/ Liz Hafalia MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE. NO SALES- MAGS OUT. less
IHOTEL04_076_LH_.JPG Emil DeGuzman, board president of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, holds up a shirt made for the 30th anniversary of the International Hotel evictions of mostly retired Chinese and ... more
Photo: Liz Hafalia
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In the late 1970s, nearly 200 people lived at the International Hotel on Kearny Street, most of them Filipino and Chinese immigrants who scraped by on pensions and Social Security checks after retiring from jobs as farmworkers or longshoremen.

After a decade of court battles and street protests over the owner's plans to replace the building with a parking garage, the tenants found themselves at the heart of an eviction controversy that made the site a landmark for the city's Asian American community.

Some moved out before the evictions were enforced, but about 50 tenants remained when police arrived in the early morning of Aug. 4, 1977, carrying clubs and using fire truck cherry pickers to enter from the roof. Outside, several thousand people linked arms to defend the last bastion of the 10-block Manilatown neighborhood, and the ensuing clash etched the hotel into local history.

The old I-Hotel has been demolished, and a new building stands in its place, but those who lived through the protests and the evictions say they still grapple with the themes that underscored the battle of Manilatown against Financial District expansion 30 years ago.

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"I-Hotel became a symbol of that struggle not only for dignity, (but) for identity, for a community to defend itself and protect its own destiny," said Ling-chi Wang, an activist and professor emeritus of Asian American studies at UC Berkeley. His wife, Linda Wang, served for years as chairwoman of the mayor's International Hotel Citizens Advisory Committee.

The nonprofit Manilatown Heritage Foundation will commemorate that legacy with a photo display and a street fair this afternoon, but the scene commemorated by the 30th anniversary events was far from celebratory.

The foundation's president, Emil DeGuzman, recalls people being pulled out of the building, choked and clubbed on the head as photographers captured the scene.

"I was brutalized myself personally," said DeGuzman, who led the hotel's tenants' association at the time. "I was taken out of the building, dragged down the street."

It was the tenants' last stand. The activists had carried their opposition all the way to the California Supreme Court before the evictions were enforced in 1977. The evictions paved the way for the end of the building and the neighborhood once characterized by bustling restaurants, nightclubs and barbershops.

"We didn't just lose the International Hotel," DeGuzman said. "We lost Manilatown."

With the hotel as a cause célèbre, local pushes for civil rights, community empowerment, low-income housing and a socially conscious, Asian American identity converged. Galvanized by the activism that marked the 1960s and 1970s, the I-Hotel supporters developed a common purpose.

"It became almost an icon for the movement, and everything became sort of enjoined in the I-Hotel struggle because the I-Hotel struggle was so real, so local, so visible, so tangible," said Gordon Chinn, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center, which developed the building that now stands at 848 Kearny St.

The original structure was razed in 1979 and the site remained an unsightly, half-block hole in the ground for almost two decades until a mayor's committee worked out the details of constructing a new housing development there. For Asian Americans in San Francisco, the hole was an emotional reminder that the struggles for low-cost housing and for community identity endured longer than bricks and mortar.

Though plans for the garage were scrapped, four levels of public parking are available underneath the new building. The 16-story International Hotel that opened in 2005 is a narrower, contemporary version of its predecessor, with about 100 rooms overlooking Kearny and Jackson streets. The neat halls shine in bright blues, oranges and reds, and its best views of the Bay Bridge and downtown are more typical of a million-dollar loft than low-cost housing reserved for seniors.

But the real value, at least for those who fought both the old structure and the new, is in the name.

"That name became a rallying cry that kept the legacy alive about the old building," said DeGuzman, board president for the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, who got involved again when planning for the new building began in the mid-1990s. "It was like ancient history when I got back. Another generation had been raised."

And it is to them that DeGuzman and other leaders of San Francisco's Asian American community are trying to impart the importance of the I-Hotel story.

"I think our lives were changed by the I-Hotel," Chinn said. "Our consciousness was changed and expanded by the I-Hotel struggle, and we're still around. We're still doing it, in different ways shapes and forms."

Online resources

For more information about San Francisco's Manilatown, go to: links.sfgate.com/ZNT

-- To hear

an interview with former International Hotel tenant Emil DeGuzman, above, who talks about the "battleground" outside the hotel between police and protesters the

morning of

Aug. 4, 1977, go to sfgate. com/podcasts.