Area put on most-endangered list
By Emil Guillermo
The Record - May 30, 2003
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| Stockton's Little Manila Foundation is fighting to save these three buildings on Lafayette Street between El Dorado and Hunter streets. On Thursday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation named the site one of the United States' 11 most-endangered historic places. |
When Stockton natives Dawn Mabalon and Dillon Delvo look at the Emerald Restaurant, the boarded-up Rizal Social Hall or the Hotel Mariposa on Hunter and Lafayette streets, they don't see three eyesores next to the freeway in downtown Stockton.
Mabalon and Delvo, the 30-year-old leaders of the Little Manila Foundation, instead see historic relics. And so do officials with the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C. On Tuesday, the Trust named the three remaining buildings of Little Manila to its list of America's 11 most endangered historic places.
The buildings are all that remains of what was the largest Filipino community outside the Philippines in the 1920s and 1930s and a reminder of when downtown thrived.
Mabalon and Delvo say trying to save what's left has become the fight of their lives.
"This is our Alamo," said Delvo, whose father was one of the thousands of Filipinos who called the small patch of downtown Little Manila.
Like the bullet-scarred Alamo, Little Manila's survivors won't win any beauty contests.
"No one's suggesting the buildings are architectural gems," said Anthony Veerkamp of the National Trust's Western office. "But these are the sorts of resources that are being obliterated in the West, social history being plowed by urban renewal. The designation should now promote a public policy that recognizes the historic character of the community."
Veerkamp was especially critical of a recent city redevelopment project that razed many of the remaining Little Manila stores and residence hotels and replaced them with a McDonald's and a 76 gasoline station. Other redevelopment projects several decades ago wiped out most of Little Manila.
"Development shouldn't happen at the expense of history," Veerkamp said.
But the National Trust's help may not be enough to save Little Manila or the rest of the area from El Dorado to California streets, identified by the city as a redevelopment zone.
Already, tenants and building owners have received official notice that their buildings will be subject to eviction and demolition within three to five years. Among the other buildings that could be razed is the Confucius Church and Chinese School.
While the city has not formally called for proposals yet, it has met with developers who are proposing a suburban-style Asian Pacific Mall.
"It's a good development and would bring a significant amount of money as well as clean up the area," said Stockton Vice Mayor Gloria Nomura. "If someone put in an Asian market, with business and medical offices, that's going to look good. So naturally, the city would go that way."
And what of the National Trust's designation?
Nomura said the city designated the site as historical, but not the buildings. "The district, not the buildings, are historical," she said of the area the city has designated with a few brown signs. "But look at the Mariposa, the Rizal and the Emerald Restaurant. What is there to say historically?"
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| Concepcion Bohulano attends a news conference Friday to announce Little Manila's most-endangered designation. |
A lot, said Dawn Mabalon.
"The designation shows this area is important to American history, not just Stockton or Filipino history," said Mabalon, chairwoman of the Little Manila Foundation.
Mabalon is also an Edison High School alumna and a doctoral history student at Stanford University. "This neighborhood plays an important part in the development of California agriculture and the settling of the West. Filipino American history is not a sidebar. It's all the same history of how Stockton became a hub of the Central Valley because of Filipino labor."
But the city appears to be on a familiar redevelopment course. Requests for proposals will go out in early June. And Nomura said she's having a second meeting with Robert Hong, who owns land in the redevelopment zone, and Manny Fernandez, a Filipino American landscape architect from Union City.
The two are behind the Asian mall idea, and preservation of Little Manila isn't part of the plan. Instead, the last Little Manila buildings would be destroyed for a parking lot.
"The whole thing must be revised to encourage businessmen to invest," Fernandez said. "If you leave the buildings alone, I don't think you can encourage people to invest in the area."
Nomura agreed and indicated an impatience for preservation ideas. "We can't wait for the Little Manila Foundation. They don't have the money," Nomura said. "And it's hard to say no to a developer."
But Mabalon said there are plans to make the foundation into a community development corporation, and then attempt to raise the millions needed to save the buildings and turn one of them, the Emerald Restaurant, into a Filipino cultural center.
Mabalon sat in the Emerald, a former Filipino union social hall, and reminisced. "They used to show old Filipino movies here," she said, dreaming of a cultural center that would perhaps show films again and display the heritage of the 15,200 Filipinos in Stockton, 6.2 percent of the city's population.
For Mabalon, the fight has always been intensely personal. Her grandfather Pablo Mabalon ran the old the Lafayette Lunch Counter, which redevelopment replaced with a McDonald's. Today, across from the drive-through window, an image of an aproned Pablo Mabalon flies on one of the Little Manila banners from a light post like a ghost.