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Aug. 24--The International Hotel, perched on the edge of the Financial district and Chinatown, is a brand new, 17-story high-rise that commands breathtaking views of San Francisco and will host senators and Silicon Valley venture capitalists at its joyous opening Friday.

But it is so much more than a building -- even one that was the focus of one of the longest affordable-housing battles in the country.

It is home. It is belonging. It is, nearly a century after the first Filipinos set foot on U.S. soil, a symbol of how the Filipino-American community has struggled and thrived in this country. The International Hotel and Manilatown Heritage Center, built nearly 30 years after its predecessor was razed, is nothing short of a triumph.

"This is the missing ingredient of who and what we are," said Emil de Guzman, president of the Manilatown Heritage Foundation, who first volunteered at the old I-Hotel, as it was known, in 1969. "There's nowhere where you can really find it. Manilatowns don't really exist today."

The center probably wouldn't have been possible back then, not in the way it has come together today. The excitement has brought together 1960s-schooled activists with VCs, major corporations with recent graduates, old money, new money, enthusiasm-but-not-very-much-money, all joined in a single vision.

And it probably wouldn't have been possible on any other site than this crucible from which so many community-serving organizations were born.

The activists may have failed on that fateful night of Aug. 4, 1977, to save the Hotel's aged Filipino and Chinese tenants from eviction, but the seeds of a community took root under the glare of TV cameras as protesters resisted police on horseback.

Through all those years, the activists, tenants and their city-appointed task force tended the fire, deepened their commitment, kept on trying to build the project. New immigrants came, some from old-line Filipino families, some who would make their fortunes in California, many settling in wooded enclaves along the Peninsula. Kept alive by the old guard, the project is nourished now by a whole community. A mature community.

"You have activists who really don't care about corporate life, and then you have the corporate people who pitched in," said Eliza Duerme, a volunteer and friend of the project's major backers, Maria and Dado Banatao. "It's fascinating that they did meet."

And fascinating that the project for which they are working is in the name of the old manongs, rough men, seamen and farmworkers who had few choices in life.

At a heady fundraising party in the Banataos' Atherton home earlier this year, two separate universes of Filipino groups met, as de Guzman, the Berkeley-Harvard educated son of working-class parents, made a presentation.

De Guzman's parents always warned him to stay away from Manilatown. In the 1960s, it was a honky-tonk of pool halls and nightclubs, bars and tenements, hard by the old Hall of Justice. No place for a college-bound kid. It was peopled by taxi dancers and criminals, barbers and bail bondsmen.

"The stereotype of Kearny Street that it was as a bunch of bums," said de Guzman, now 58. "I saw just the opposite. Kearny Street represented our poorest. I saw they were defenseless, and we had to do something."

The half-million challenge grant pledged by the Banataos has spurred fundraising momentum.

"The I-Hotel is able to draw these connections through the social strata," said Dexter Gordon-Ligot, a recent college graduate who hosted a hipster cocktail fundraiser at a South of Market bistro.

Duerme, who immigrated in 1981, recalled how Maria Banatao lamented the lack of such a place: "Maria said, 'I have grandchildren and all I could show them here is Goldilocks bakery and lumpia and adobo.' "

Not for long. The Smithsonian Institution is considering the new center as an exhibit site for its 2006 commemoration of the centennial of Filipino immigration.

"It is collective identity," Duerme said. "This would be for the good of all."

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