Chan Is Missing - Manilatown Senior Center
Director Wayne Wang cast a light not only on the Chinese in Chinatown but also other Asian communities, including Filipino. This next scene was filmed at the Senior Center in Manilatown, a ten block section of Kearny Street that overlapped Chinatown as it stretched from Market Street, on the left below, to Columbus Avenue, on the right.
At its peak, over 1000 residents lived in Manilatown together with 30,000 transient laborers who for decades were forbidden by legislation to own land or set up businesses. They mostly lived in rooming houses and low-income residential hotels such as the International Hotel at 848 Kearny, which also housed the Manilatown Senior center until 1977 when the hotel was evicted prior to being torn down.
Jo and Steve stop by the Manilatown Senior Center after hearing that Chan often enjoyed listening to mariachi music there.
The camera pans the width of the room then captures several shots of the manongs and manangs as they relax and dance to the easy rhythm of Sabor A Mi by Los Lobos del Este de L.A. (you can hear it here).
Then … But this isn’t the International Hotel, which was an empty lot when the movie was made: instead it was filmed two blocks away at the Senior Center’s transplanted home at 636 Clay Street in the basement of the Hotel Justice building, seen below in a 1964 photo (map).
… and Now, the hotel has since been renamed the Balmoral Hotel. 636 Clay is the entrance in the center of the building; it’s now the DaVita Chinatown Dialysis Center. (CitySleuth was unable to enter to get a matching Now photo of the interior space because it’s off-limits to non-patients).
In a back room Jo and Steve meet staffer Presco Tabios (left, in front of a photo of tenants taken outside the International Hotel before it was torn down) and Frankie Alarcon (right). They each have different ideas about where Chan might be. Presco tells a long story about a musician who lost his ability to play and ended up realizing the only person who could help him was right there reflected in a rain puddle.
“You guys are looking for Mr. Chan?” Presco asks, “Why don’t you look in the puddle?”
Blogger Jimmy J. Aquino captured that thought with this whimsical cartoon ...
Frankie tells them he thinks Chan went back to mainland China to sort out a property issue with his brothers. Then he remembers Chan had left a jacket right there in the Senior Center. They find it and in a pocket there’s a newspaper cutting about an old friend of Chan’s, a People’s Republic of China supporter, accused of shooting a Chinese flag-waver at San Francisco’s recent Chinese New Year Celebration - because it was a Taiwanese flag. (The P.R.C versus R.C. antipathy within the community is a recurring theme throughout the movie).
A word is in order here about the shameful demise of the International Hotel. It had been at 848 Kearny since 1873, eventually becoming the heart of the Filipino-American community, surrounded by restaurants, coffee shops, pool halls, gambling venues - all things Filipino. But by 1968 the city had decided to gentrify (aka ethnic-cleanse) the area and supported the eviction of the elderly tenants, prompting a bitter nine-year conflict with anti-eviction protesters. This 1977 photo of the hotel shows one of their protest banners spanning Kearny Street.
Most of the 179 residents were evicted during the 1970s but 55 of them held out. ln the early hours of Aug 4, 1977 3,000 protesters assembled there to resist a rumored forcible eviction by the police (photo by Nancy Wong).
Sure enough, they came, 300 strong. Police on horseback dispersed the crowd with batons while others used ladders to gain access to the building (photo by Terry Schmitt/Chronicle).
Sheriff Richard Hongisto wielded a sledgehammer to personally evict one of the tenants. Earlier, he had been held in contempt of court and sentenced to jail for 5 days for refusing to carry out the eviction order. Go figure! (photo by Terry Schmitt/Chronicle).
… by 1979 … after the eviction the hotel was demolished, seen here reduced to a street-level facade (photo by Nancy Wong). The Manilatown Kearny Street corridor would never be the same again.
… and Now, the corner site remained an empty parking lot for years; the developers withdrew while both sides of the conflict licked their wounds and bickered over what to do with it. In a final irony, a cross-cultural coalition received federal HUD funding to build a community center and 104-unit building for low-income seniors; it opened in 2005, 28 years after the eviction.
