Aug. 6--Before the current housing crunch, before the insane prices and rents, before "the homeless" had entered the American lexicon, there was the International Hotel.

The I-Hotel. A down-at-the-heels, Manilatown tenement of single rooms and single, retired men that became a cause celebre for thousands across the Bay Area in the 1970s. It was, perhaps, the first modern-day housing crisis in the Bay Area to be covered in the national media.

This is a story about community and activism. And heartbreak. And persevering.

It changed the way many people viewed urban displacement. It led to changes in law, and it fundamentally changed the relationship between landlords and tenants.

If you're wondering where Manilatown is, it's probably because it died so long ago. On Aug. 4, 1977, the last remaining block of a 10-block stretch on Kearny Street in San Francisco was the scene of an incredible showdown between San Francisco sheriff's deputies enforcing an eviction of the hotel and 5,000 supporters drawn from all around the Bay Area.

"It broke their hearts," said Emil DeGuzman, who was a student at the University of California-Berkeley when he became part of a late 1960s movement of Asian-American college students who were going back into the community to learn about their heritage and work for change. On weekends, they cleaned and repaired and painted and brought the aging building up to code. They provided services on site, took seniors on outings and built a vibrant community in the eight years of court battles over the hotel.

When they lost to developers, some 50 elderly men who had spent their lifetimes as seamen or cannery workers or farm laborers were forced into the pre-dawn streets under the glare and television camera lights with nowhere to go. Thousands had marched in the streets in support. Thousands had locked arms and barricaded the hotel with their bodies. And lost.

"Pain," said poet and activist Al Robles. "Love. Sadness. Beauty.

We still see the shadows of the manongs on Kearny Street," he said, using the Tagalog honorific for elder Filipino men. "We still see the tears."

The I-Hotel was razed and a generation was born and came of age while developers and the mayor's appointed citizens advisory group faced off several times. The manongs and Chinese ex-tenants scattered to other residential hotels, and continued to age and die.

But the I-Hotel rises today.

There is construction in the big hole that was the hotel. The new work is the product of a partnership of the Catholic archdiocese and the Chinatown Community Housing Development Corp., itself a housing and land-use organization that grew out of the activism that the I-Hotel engendered and is headed by a former I-Hotel advocate.

St. Mary's Catholic Center will have an elementary school, the Filipino community will have a Manilatown Heritage Center -- and 105 units of federally subsidized senior citizen housing will be built.

Sunday, former tenants -- including activists then who are now nearly senior citizens -- gathered for an afternoon-long commemoration called "Coming Home."

The mayor spoke. Filipino seniors took center stage to sing "Dahil sa iyo," the old Tagalog love song that captured another time in Manilatown. Young people performed their poetry. Community workers talked about the past -- and the future for housing.

There is a march planned Wednesday night and a "talk story" event Friday.

"The citizens advisory committee deserves the props to make sure nothing was built without housing," said Bill Sorro, 63, who lived at the I-Hotel and was part of the community.

Therein lies a message for those facing the daunting task of building affordable housing today.

It takes long, sustained work to win the day. And standing for something.

"That's the way struggles are," Sorro said. "That's the way movements are."

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