Densho Digital Archive - Bob Santos Interview III (denshovh-sbob

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TI: Going back to that weekend where you, all the people came down and you hauled out that debris, what was the atmosphere of that weekend? You guys did lots of work, but I just want to get a sense of what it felt like that weekend.

BS: Well, the thing was we were, many of us knew about the International Hotel issue in San Francisco. It was the last remaining hotel on Kearny Street and it was the last building in old Manilatown. The financial district, I mean, they, the city of San Francisco just came into Manilatown and just, using the power of eminent domain, wiped out about thirty blocks that included Manilatown. And that was the last building, the International Hotel was the last building standing, and it was occupied mostly by Filipinos, Filipino elderly. And there, the business, there was a barbershop, there was Bayani Han Restaurant, and I used to go to these places. And those of us at InterIm would go down to San Francisco and check out what was happening, and it gave us inspiration that we didn't want the International District, we didn't want what happened in Manilatown to happen in the International District, which would be the wipeout of a whole community, and for us it was a whole ethnic community. Most of the people in the International District, the businesses and property owners really didn't understand why we were fighting so hard to preserve this neighborhood, this community. We were fighting to preserve the housing for the people who built it, and that was our parents, our grandparents and great-grandparents. We didn't want them displaced out of the neighborhood that they built. So we looked at other cities similar to ours for inspiration to really fight, fight hard to preserve this neighborhood. So that's sort of what happened at that time, and there was a lot of energy, a lot of excitement that we were doing something. Young people were, young people used to love to go out to demonstrations, right? The Black, with the Black United Construction Workers, with the Indians, and with the war movement, they got out of school and they could march and have fun. But someone had to stay behind after all that, all the marches, and negotiate whatever we needed. The reasons why we marched in the International District was so that we could preserve the housing. We marched so that we could build a health center for the residents of the community. And young people loved to do that, but someone had to do the work behind all these demonstrations.

TI: But they really complement each other because with a demonstration it got people's attention. They knew there was, the community was involved.

BS: Exactly.

TI: And, but you needed that second part. You need someone to, to really...

BS: Right. You need the second part. So I got to be that guy. I got to tell the story about taking over the mayor's office, at that time was Uhlman or Royer, and John Spellman's office. John Spellman was King County Executive, and we always had problems with John and his stadium, and he was a really good guy, but we had to demand some mitigation for stadiums and all this stuff, so we would go, we would go to these offices and we'd sort of take over the conference room, and then the mayor or the county executive would come in, and then the radicals would start in. Doug Chin and Steve Locke and Frank Irigon start, you know, "MF this," and, "F that," and, "You're destroying our community and you're displacing our residents and they're dying of malnutrition," and the phonebooks would be flying and they would storm out, the radicals. And then Uncle Bob would stay behind, and these guys would look at me and say, "We thought the Asians were sort of just going along with things and we didn't know there were any radicals in the movement." And I think they expected me to apologize for them, and I'd say, "No, their parents and their grandparents are being displaced out of their communities, so there's a lot of legitimacy here in their activism. Lot of these folks are getting older and they don't have time for the old people who are either dying off or being sent out of the community to rest homes." So that sort of set the tone for InterIm staff and the community to be looked at as a part of the city that became a priority for the new housing, the new housing for low income seniors to be built. Our neighborhood's one of the priority neighborhoods.

TI: So I want to go back to those sit ins and demonstrations, so, like the sit ins with the mayor or King County Executive Spellman, were they scripted so that when you talked with the radicals you'd say, "Okay, so your role is to raise a ruckus and then when you storm out I'll stay back and talk it through"? Was that all kind of talked through?

BS: No, it wasn't scripted. But when it happened the first time we said, "Oh, this is working," so we, any time we went to a meeting with an elected official we brought those people with us. "You guys got to come back." So it wasn't scripted, but they knew what they were gonna do, and we knew what they were gonna do.

TI: Okay. Good.

BS: And you know who stood behind? It was people like myself, Ben Wu. He was great. He went to all the demonstrations and he was one of us that stayed behind to do negotiating, so he took, he was the Chinatown expert, right? And Tomio went to a couple of them. Shigeko Uno, the wonderful woman who was manager of Rainier Heat and Power, which owned maybe one-third of the property in the International District, she was very key 'cause she managed a lot of properties, and she was very supportive of the actions that InterIm was taking at these meeting with public officials.

TI: Okay. And going back again to that weekend when everything was, where you had to clean up the Milwaukee Hotel, I just want to get a sense, because they, the judge gave you a tall order to fulfill, do these ten.

BS: Yes.

TI: Was there a sense of hope amongst the people doing this that you could actually pull this off? I was just trying to get a sense of where you guys were. Like this is, again, what were people talking about?

BS: We made a commitment to the judge that we would eliminate all the violations, and then when we got out of the chamber we did. We sat around, said wow, we're gonna have to do a lot of fundraisers 'cause we're gonna have to buy equipment, we're gonna have to bring in some contractors to help do some of the work.

TI: This was a weekend. This was like...

BS: The weekend was, yeah. We had to develop a plan, what we had to eliminate, what we had to clean up, and that's when it was decided, that weekend we decided to close up half the building. As we walked through the building we knew we couldn't, we couldn't eliminate those violations within the weekend, so we closed the building. We asked the fire department if that was okay and they told us what we had to do to close off half of the building, so we were able to do that.

TI: But during that --

BS: We brought in, we brought in a lot of our architects that were on the board. We brought in some experts who laid out some of the needs that we, some of the needs that we had to do and equipment that we had to buy in order to pull this off. And so people started pooling their money, and we had a couple of real quick fundraisers. And don't forget, we kept the residents of the Milwaukee Hotel in place. Some of them had to move from the closed off areas into the existing area, but the little old ladies, the little old Chinese ladies and some of the old manongs, the Filipino guys, they would cook dinner for us. And there was a gathering place in the lobby, and so they kept us nourished, and tea and dim sum that they were making in their hotel rooms, so it became sort of a work in progress for a seventy-two hour period of time.

TI: Yeah, what an amazing story.

BS: Yeah, we've got, we got some, I think there are some editorials that were written about that, and I've got 'em locked in there somewhere, but I got to get, maybe get them out so that you can read them.

TI: Now, was anyone documenting it, just, like someone with a camera, just taking pictures of you working or anything like that?

BS: Yeah, there was some of that going on, too. There were a couple of guys, guys that were, that had cameras. Donny Chin, Tim Otani, Dean Wong, those kind of folks could document stuff. And we found this journal. It was an empty journal, so every, every person that did fire watch, they wrote in a report of the night, of the day or the night of their particular fire watch. Maxine Chan -- you know Maxine Chan? -- so one night she writes in, "Walking down the hall, room 302, Mr. and Mrs. Such-and-Such arguing. Frying pans throwing around the room. 321, door was unlocked. Opened the door. Mrs. Someone from 403 was in the room with what's his name from 204," and she was writing that stuff down. [Laughs]

TI: [Laughs] Everything.

BS: And you had to read this journal to really appreciate what was, what was going on in the building. These guys are, you're talking about people that were a step away from being homeless, and so they really, they had to struggle to stay alive, and many of, some of them were retired, some of 'em were working in low paying jobs, and so they were the cream of the world, I thought, really funny people.

TI: Good story.

BS: Oh, one day I go to the InterIm office and one of the old guys from Milwaukee Hotel is at the door, at the door as I'm unlocking. He said, "Uncle Bob, we have problem. Man sick. Man sick, come on right away. He, I think he dying." So I, before I go to the Milwaukee Hotel I go by the, the health clinic, and I call Edna, one of the nurses. I said, "Edna, you got to come. I think we've got somebody sick." So we go up the stairs, third floor, and we look up and this guy's hanging there. He committed suicide. He's pretty bad shape, he's turning blue. And I said, we cut him down, and I said, "Edna, check to see his pulse." She says, "I'm not touching him. They'll think I killed him," this really funny stuff, but, it was serious stuff too, but we had people with mental, mental problems, not only in the Milwaukee Hotel, but lot of the people who lived in conditions like the Milwaukee Hotel, single room occupancy units, maybe they've left their families and there's been some divorce, and very, some very lonely people in that building. Very lonely people were living in the downtown core, especially if they're single, either the women or the men. So we made a point, the InterIm staff, to talk to every person in the ID, even if you just say hi. You see someone on the street, just say hi. It'll make their day. Some people will, they'll go through the whole day and really not have a conversation. So we became known individually, staff people at InterIm, as this friendly group of young people, just because we did things like that and we went out of our way to help people who have problems, social security checks late, that kind of stuff. We're doing that social service kinds of stuff, even before social workers came in, like ACRS, before they came into the community.