By Bob Frost
San Jose Mercury News - November 9, 2003
Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, George Washington’s Mount Vernon, San Francisco’s City Hall — these are among the scores of magnificent old structures in the United States that are easy to love and preserve as monuments to our history. But what about three scruffy old buildings in Stockton — the Mariposa Hotel, Emerald Restaurant and Rizal Social Club?
These three structures, located in a poor multiethnic neighborhood, are all that remains of Stockton’s “Little Manila'’ community, which was founded in the early 1900s and provided a gateway into America for thousands of Filipinos, many of whom worked in the fertile fields not far away. In what became the largest Filipino community outside the Philippines, the immigrants created a vibrant district of restaurants, dance halls and street life and named it after the most important city of their homeland.
Now, two people of Filipino heritage are fighting over the fate of Little Manila’s last buildings. One, Dawn Mabalon, is a Stockton native and Stanford doctoral student in history who believes the structures should be restored as a museum, and as a way to help save a culture.
The other, Manuel Fernandez, is an architect and developer based in Oakland who wants to tear down the buildings and build a shopping mall with an Asian theme, a magnet that could help a troubled neighborhood.
Their disagreement puts a fine point on a debate in America about how best to remember days gone by. This debate has gained strength and volume over the last several decades as “Let’s bulldoze this urban blight'’ — an idea epitomized in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s by Robert Moses in New York City and M. Justin Herman in San Francisco — has been countered by “Maybe it’s worth saving.'’
Not all agree with the trend toward preservation, however. Noted architect Philip Johnson believes that much of it is misguided. Norman Tyler, an architectural scholar at Eastern Michigan University, wrote in 1986: Johnson “is hard on those who cannot distinguish what is old and significant from what is simply old.'’
Which elements of the past are just old and which are significant? The answer has evolved in the past 40 years in parallel with a sea change in the field of academic history.
Until the 1960s, the U.S. history profession centered on “political history'’ — the “top-down'’ history of leaders, wars, diplomats, constitutions. Scholarly studies of ordinary people, called “social history,'’ also had a place at the table, but it was secondary.
The shift was spurred by a number of developments, including the civil rights movement and publication in 1963 of an influential book about the English working class in the early 19th century.
Many of the new history scholars — an increasing proportion of them non-white or female — were inspired to devote their careers to researching history from the bottom up, bringing fresh life to peasants, women, immigrants, gays, the working class — and ethnic groups.
This appreciation for previously overlooked pieces of the past percolated into society as a whole. Over the past couple of decades, in cities and towns around the country, buildings that might have been destroyed or neglected in another era have been saved and cherished.
In San Jose, some of the impetus behind preservation of the Kuwabara Hospital can be attributed to a climate emphasizing the value of social and ethnic history. The graceful structure in Japantown was built in 1910 as one of California’s first Japanese medical centers. In 1991, with community support, the San Jose chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League took title to the building, now known as the Issei Memorial Building, with the understanding that it would honor the structure’s history.
Preservation issues have been raised around the country at such historic ethnic sites as the Ybor City Historic District in Tampa, (Latin culture), the Panama Hotel in Seattle (Japanese-American), Philadelphia’s Paul Robeson House (African-American), Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood (African-American), New Mexico’s Zuni Salt Lake and Sanctuary Zone (American Indian) and in Chinatowns in San Francisco, Honolulu and Boston.
In Los Angeles, Little Tokyo is a major victory for preservationists, a lively commercial-tourist-residential district honoring the Japanese-American past.
But much is being lost, too. For example, redevelopment agencies in some cities have been creating controversy by razing rowhouses that once sheltered workers making their first shy steps into the American mainstream. “Even the people who once lived in them might wonder at the fuss,'’ journalist Ray Suarez wrote in 2000. “But workers’ housing is part of the American puzzle, along with aging mansions, factories, forts, archaeological sites, works of art and documents.'’
In Stockton, a city of 250,000 that is a truck and rail hub for the farmland of the San Joaquin Valley, saving Little Manila has so far taken a back seat to modernization.
Mabalon, who has spent her time at Stanford studying Little Manila’s long and colorful history, watched with sadness in recent years as the city tore down chunks of the decaying neighborhood to make way for a “gateway'’ for motorists from Interstate 5 to downtown.
In 2000, Mabalon, whose family ran a lunch counter in the area for decades, formed the Little Manila Foundation, which began working with the Filipino American National Historical Society to try to buy and rehabilitate the three remaining buildings and put a national Filipino museum in them — one good enough, she hopes, to attract a steady stream of tourists.
This year, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the three buildings among the nation’s 11 “most endangered'’ historic places, a coveted honor, albeit one that holds no legal weight.
While Mabalon believes that a smart use of history can equal economic growth, developer Fernandez, who also is a city council member in Union City, wants to take a more direct route by building a mall. According to his plan filed with the city, he would raze the three structures and use that area as an entry to the mall.
This autumn, Mabalon’s foundation is competing with Fernandez and his allies for the city’s nod to become “master redeveloper'’ for the eight-block neighborhood. Hanging in the balance is not only the fate of buildings but also the way Filipino-American history will be remembered.
The United States is full of examples of immigrant groups who occupied tightly knit urban enclaves with their own shops, restaurants, places of worship and night life. Some of these enclaves have stayed vibrant, but often an ethnic neighborhood declines, or at least changes, as the children and grandchildren of first-generation immigrants leave.
That moving on is a sign of success, a symbol of the American melting pot at full boil. But it is also the moment when we can lose important parts of the past.
BOB FROST (bobfrostmail@aol.com) is a San Francisco writer with a special interest in history. He wrote this article for Perspective.
