The Filipino community presence in the South of Market spans over 100 years, part of a
larger movement of immigration to the US that began in the early 1900s. Today, the SOMA Pilipinas cultural district exists as a robust city and community entity that advocates for South of Market to remain a home to the Filipino community in San Francisco.
20th century history
During the 1910s, the first Filipino enclave in the city, known as “Manilatown,” began to coalesce along Kearny Street between Pine and Pacific streets. Like other minorities, they were subjected to racial discrimination in the form of racial covenants, which forced them to live in proximity to existing Asian enclaves like Chinatown. The Manilatown Heritage Foundation collected the memories of a manong (first generation Filipino immigrants) living there during this time:
There were three Filipino barbershops on Kearny Street. One next door to the International Hotel. This was Tino’s Shop. And next door to that was the Bataan Drug Store, the Bataan Pool Hall, the Bataan Restaurant.“
In the next decade, several properties in South of Market’s South Park were also acquired by Filipino owners as that area’s Japanese population started to move to present-day Japantown. Gran Oriente Filipino, a Masonic organization founded by Filipino Merchant Marines in the early 1920s, began renting 106 South Park Street in 1935. Their eventual purchase of the building in the 1940s has preserved the building as a crown jewel of the Filipino legacy in the area.
While an ethnic enclave akin to Manilatown did not fully develop in the South of Market during
the 1940s and 1950s, Filipinos did begin to make up an increasingly larger segment of the congregations at two of the neighborhood’s most prominent Catholic churches: Saint Patrick’s Church and Saint Joseph’s Church. By the late 1960s, the influx of Filipino families grew exponentially in the South of Market, and Filipinos became the single largest ethnic group in the neighborhood.
Born in the fight for anti-displacement
This continued growth of the Filipino community in the South of Market coincided with the demise of Manilatown, culminating in the loss of the International Hotel on Kearny Street. Housing nearly 150 Filipino and Chinese seniors, three community groups, an art workshop, a radical bookstore, and three Asian newspapers, on August 4, 1977, a multiracial alliance of over 3,000 people unsuccessfully tried to prevent their eviction from hundreds of club-wielding riot police. The building was eventually demolished in 1979.
The community that coalesced in opposition to the displacement of the International Hotel’s residents continued serving as a source of inspiration for the next generation of SOMA advocates, including the future SOMA Pilipinas.
With the first tech boom of the late 1990s and 2000s, many longtime Filipino residents—families who had lived there since the 1950s and 60s—were starting to be priced out.
SOMA Pilipinas’ Cultural History, Housing, Economic, Sustainability Strategy (CHHESS) explains that these changes were not unique to SOMA:
Between 1990 and 2015, San Francisco experienced significant demographic changes, particularly in the neighborhoods where communities of color live. Some of the changes observed in these neighborhoods were not “natural” demographic shifts resulting from individual households choosing to move elsewhere, but resulted from eviction, large rent increases, or other reasons otherwise known as displacement.”
Organizations like the South Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN), whose anti-displacement work foregrounded the creation of the cultural district, were key to ensuring the creation of early community stabilization mechanisms like the Youth and Family Special Use District and the SOMA Stabilization Fund (ensuring that developers could pay into a fund to help stabilize and fund services for the South of Market community). It was through programs like these that neighborhood Filipino organizations were able to ensure that the city met the needs of Filipino families in the neighborhood. (Read more about SOMCAN’s legacy of service work here.)
Creation of a cultural district
Like SOMCAN, The SOMA Pilipinas Cultural District was founded to help protect families and Filipino businesses in the neighborhood that were experiencing continual displacement.
A key victory in the 2000s included allowing Filipino businesses and nonprofits to remain in the Mint Mall and Hall at 951-957 Mission Street. From the perspective of longtime community organizers, this was the moment that eventually led to the creation of the cultural district, one that, according to SOMCAN’s Zachary Frial, “ignited a new wave of activism for the community and really defending this as our home.”
Officially approved and recognized in 2016, SOMA Pilipinas was among the first cultural districts to be created, before the city actually formalized the cultural districts program in 2018. Supported by hotel tax revenue and guided by tailored strategies to address the needs of each community, ten cultural districts across the city have been designated since 2014.
Cultural districts are unique in that a core tenet of the program is anti-displacement. Unlike architecture-based preservation tools focusing on tangible heritage, cultural districts are an important tool to protect the broad array of intangible elements that define a community’s cultural character—its festivals and other traditions, its institutions, its businesses. People, and the places where they live and work, are at the heart of this program.
The Bessie Carmichael School/Filipino Education Center was constructed on the lot of the old Lincoln School, and today is the only public school building in the South of Market; Columbia Square was turned over for school use at the same time and was only reinstated as parkland in 2006, rechristened Victoria Manalo Draves Park. It is named after the first American woman to win two gold medals in diving, and the first Filipina American to win Olympic gold medals.
A key city player
Today, SOMA Pilipinas is an influential player in a city where Tagolog is certified as its third official language. The cultural district helped further legitimize the place of Filipinos within the SOMA neighborhood; 2020 Census Data showed that a third of San Francisco’s Filipino residents lived within the district.
The district built upon the previously mentioned work like the stabilization funds and the Youth and Family Special Use District, and the program overall became a new tool for marginalized communities to prevent displacement of residents, businesses, and artists who created San Francisco’s sense of diverse culture.
The cultural district has a seat at the table: built into its founding resolution are stipulations that the city will collaborate with the cultural district on the creation of these types of preservation and sustainability strategies.
Celebrating a legacy
Running now through January 6, 2026, a milestone exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts called MAKIBAKA: A Living Legacy celebrates the cultural district’s connection to the culture, contributions, and presence of the Filipino community in the South of Market. Be sure to visit and learn how SOMA Pilipinas and thriving landscape of community partners are creating innovative economic, public realm, and
cultural activation strategies that draw Filipino leaders, entrepreneurs, and artists
together to the regional hub that it is today.
Sources
Manilatown Heritage Foundation
SOMA Pilipinas CHHESS Report, September 2022.
Central SOMA Historic Context Statement and Historic Resource Survey, March 2015.
Community Voices interview with Zachary Frial, SF Heritage News (October-December 2025)
In October 2025, SF Heritage is spotlighting the South of Market neighborhood, part of its Heritage in the Neighborhoods program.
