By Christie Li for San Francisco Heritage
Introduction
On October 7, 2025, the Board of Supervisors voted to recognize the Mint Mall and Hall, an epicenter for the Filipino American community in San Francisco, as a city landmark. The mixed-used site was originally built in 1916 as a hotel and located at 951-957 Mission Street in the South of Market (SOMA) neighborhood. The Mint Mall at 951-957 Mission Street is now home to 25 individual tenant spaces in the basement, ground floor, and mezzanine, while the Mint Hall at 957 Mission houses over a hundred resident units on the upper four floors.
Following the Immigration Act of 1965 that abolished national-origins quotas and the Immigration Act of 1990 that permitted Filipino World War II veterans to apply for US citizenship, an influx of Filipino immigrants moved into San Francisco. As they settled in SOMA, their arrival also shaped the residential and commercial landscape of the community, establishing Mint Mall and Hall as a gravitational center for Filipino culture and advocacy. Mint Mall and Hall to this day greets new immigrants as a physical and monumental gateway to their new lives; its landmarking is not only a victory from the vantage of historic preservation, but also as a continuation of San Francisco’s legacy anti-displacement organizing.
A residential and cultural hub
Though the suburban neighborhoods of the Excelsior and Crocker-Amazon in District 11 are home to the largest populations of Filipino Americans, SOMA contains a higher concentration of Filipino Americans in an area, a cultural hub emerging organically out of the neighborhood’s density. The commercial tenant units within the Mint Mall provide culturally-appropriate goods and services to the intergenerational families building their first home in the United States. The San Francisco Planning Department’s Landmarking Designation terms the building as a “nerve center” for SOMA, counting hair salons, a remittance center, and a site of worship among their many commercial tenants.
In the 1980s, a majority of Mint Mall’s commercial tenant units were Filipino-owned, including several notable community-serving businesses such as Filipino American bookstore Arkipelago Books and Teatro ng Tanan, a Filipino American theatre company. Bindlestiff Studio, a Filipino American performing arts venue, also previously rented a commercial unit in Mint Hall for office space while performing across San Francisco.
JT Restaurant
One of the longest-standing tenants is JT Restaurant, a family-owned Filipino counter-serve establishment owned and operated by “Tita” Tess Diaz. Originally opened in 1994 by Tita Tess’s brother and sister under the name New Filipinas Restaurant, Tita Tess and her husband Juan took over the restaurant in 2000 when her siblings moved back to the Philippines; she subsequently changed the name to JT “Juan and Tita” Restaurant in 2010.
As a neighborhood-serving institution whose physical space occupies an essential role in the collective memory of its customers and the broader community, many customers of JT Restaurant are Mint Hall residents themselves, growing up under the watchful eye of Tita Tess.
When I first came here, the young ones called me Tita, and now their babies call me Tita.” —Tess Diaz
JT Restaurant also operates as a de facto community room, drawing in the youth residents of Mint Hall and from neighboring youth organizations.
I’d go to Bessie Carmichael, feed their kids, help them with the assignments, and take care of all the kids when the mom and dad come home for work for free. The kids ask me to do a food test, and I give them lumpia. The mom called me Tita, then they got married, and they have three kids. They don’t live here anymore, but all the kids still call me Tita. I’m everyone’s Tita.”
Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, JT restaurant frequently catered to many well-known community leaders and community-based organizations across San Francisco and SOMA: community poet Al Robles and tenant organizer Bill Sorro, and anchor organizations including Manilatown Heritage Foundation, Bill Sorro Housing Program, SOMCAN, and the Senior Action Network, are all counted among its customers. Tita Tess also previously maintained a regular stream of customers from Chinatown and Manilatown; however, many individuals have since passed on or moved away.
At the community level, JT Restaurant has also played an active role in the landmark designation process—Tita Tess gave public comment at the Historic Preservation Commission during the Mint Mall and Hall landmarking process. During the community meetings to inform building tenants of the landmark designation, JT Restaurant catered food for the SOMCAN organizers and residents.
When community members enter the restaurant with a question, or to stop for a chat, the room transforms into a place of information-sharing, with Tita Tess at the helm. Her institutional memory of the building, combined with connections to other SOMA community stakeholders, make Tita Tess an invaluable culture-bearer to residents.
When Filipinos first come here, they’re gonna start looking for a place to stay. There’s an apartment I can help them find, a job, we have everything here: SOMA Pilipinas, SOMCAN, Manilatown, Baniyanan, Bill Sorro Housing. If they come here and ask me for a lawyer when they get evicted, I tell them, “Go to this place, here’s the card. Tell them I sent them there. For everybody who needs something, this is the bridge that goes there, because everybody talks to me. If they need a place for their sister, go to Bill Sorro. They left their key in their apartment, I went to Tenant Key because they have a social worker who will help them.”
Beyond functioning as an accessible and affordable home for newcomer Filipino migrants, the Mint Mall and Hall holds deep cultural significance as a space imbued with informal networks. By disseminating information to residents and customers at JT Restaurant, Tita Tess essentially connects them to an ecosystem of supportive community services.
History of organizing
Prior to SOMA, the first Filipino enclave formed during the early 20th century in Manilatown, a neighborhood bordering present-day Chinatown. Manilatown unfortunately fell prey to urban renewal, a movement that attempted to confront urban decay by replacing existing buildings with new developments. It instead devastated low-income urban communities across the nation. San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency was established in 1948 and displaced Black residents in the Fillmore and Filipino residents in Manilatown. Many of these Filipino manongs (first generation immigrants) resided in the International Hotel (I-Hotel), a building consisting of 150 single-room-occupancy units. On August 4, 1977, after nine-years of community action, I-Hotel residents were evicted by riot police. Many of the Mint Mall and Hall organizers cut their teeth during the I-Hotel site fight, and were well equipped to form the Mint Mall Organizing Committee around thirty years later.
The Mint Mall and Hall as a site of organizing
During the dotcom boom of the early 2000s, SOMA’s transition into a financial hub posed a threat to the existing low-income communities.
On the residential side, a series of Ellis Act evictions displaced SOMA residents in nearby buildings from their units: a California state law enacted in 1968, it allowed property owners to exit the residential housing business through evictions. Though landlords are restricted from re-entering the rental market for several years after invoking the Ellis Act, many landlords leveraged this opportunity to create a “change-of-use” and convert affordable rooms to market-rate tenancy-in-common or condominium units. Illegal industrial to commercial property conversions also became prevalent in the neighborhood during the tech boom, threatening to change the spatial landscape and plowing forward to construct high-rise office spaces.
With the I-Hotel as a training ground, Bill Sorro, a founding member of the I-Hotel tenants’ union, and Marie Romero, Arkipelago Books founder, led the organizing efforts at the Mint Mall and Hall. The Mint Mall Organizing Committee (MMOC) coalesced to fight eviction notices served to nonprofit tenants and prevent the future displacement of other commercial spaces. Through the organizing work of Marie Romero, Bill Sorro, Jeanne Batallones, Roy Recio, and lawyer Gen Fujioka, the tenants of Mint Mall rallied to address the Mid-Market Project Area Committee, a branch of San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency. Drawing from their experiences at the I-Hotel, these community leaders established connections between the attempted dotcom boom evictions and the Manilatown evictions in the 1960s-1970s, successfully keeping tenants in place.
The Mint Mall and Hall as a political stage
Organizer Bill Sorro also advocated reclaiming the Mint Mall and Hall as a political “capital city” for San Francisco’s Filipino community. Sorro recognized the site for what it was, an invaluable community resource. Through community gatherings to celebrate MMOC’s organizing victories, residents and community members activated the building for holidays, cultural performances, and even political activity. The Mint Mall and Hall turned into a political stage and the site became a culturally and politically significant gathering place for campaign kickoffs, engaging residents through doorknocking, phonebanking, and direct outreach.
As SOMA Pilipinas Executive Director Raquel Redondiez described, “the Filipino community has always helped elect supervisors that supported community initiatives, including landmarking.” Beyond local elections, residents also campaigned for the Philippines’ general elections on site; as the point of first entry for the Filipino community, many families arrived via chain migration and had strong ties to the homeland.
The symbolism of Mint Mall and Hall as a center of political activity is especially significant considering its location in SOMA, the epicenter of development aggression in San Francisco. Tita Tess herself has been informally crowned the “Mayor of SOMA” by various community leaders. “I gave the award to Supervisor Jane Kim in City Hall, and they said, ‘Did you know that Tess is the Mayor of SOMA?’” At a time when displacement pressures are high, leveraging a community’s political capital and relationships with elected officials allow Mint Mall and Hall to affirm its importance in the neighborhood.
Other threats to the existence of Mint Mall and Hall have continued rearing their heads. In 2015 former Mayor Ed Lee proposed the Twitter Tax Cut, a tax credit luring tech companies into SOMA by exempting them from a 1.5% payroll tax for all employees hired in the neighborhood. To take advantage of the influx of affluent workers, developers constructed a flood of market-rate condominiums, further shifting the balance of the working-class residents in the neighborhood. Tita Tess noted how the changes in SOMA are reflected in the customer demographics of JT Restaurant:
It’s a big change, it’s not like before. Now there’s all the conference people, like Dreamforce, or meetings from a lab.”
Legacy
In the current era of real estate deregulation and ensuing developer speculation threatening to displace low-income urban communities, the Mint Mall and Hall continues to function as a center of life for Filipino Americans in San Francisco. When asked about her future wish for SOMA Filipinas, Redondiez replied:
My dream is that it continues to be a thriving community that’s affordable for all immigrant working-class families, people from all over the world seeking refuge, where visitors and tourists can learn real Filipino history and culture… the decolonized version….SOMA is like an archipelago in itself. We’re really lucky to just have that kind of rich history, culture, and legacy.”
This legacy is a testament to both the power-building of residents, community organizers, and small businesses anchoring the community.
From the redevelopment movement’s dispossession of Manilatown residents, to the Mint Mall and Hall Organization Committee’s fight against dot-com era developers—the site stands as a reminder of community resilience. The recent landmark designation highlights how important landmarking is as a tool for cultural preservation and neighborhood stabilization, ensuring that the site can continue serving generations to come. As the first home for so many families, Mint Mall and Hall is in the heart of SOMA and all of San Francisco.
Sources
Landmark Designation Recommendation Executive Summary, Hearing Date: September 3, 2025, pg. 5-14
Interview with Tess Diaz, Oct 6, 2025
Interview with Raquel Redondiez, Oct 12, 2025
SOMA Pilipinas: Past & Future, Jeantelle Laberinto, Raquel Redondiez, David Woo Mahalya SF, June 3, 2022
Lurie faults Twitter tax break as being a ‘one-way street’, Troy Wolverton, SF Standard, June 5, 2025
In October 2025, SF Heritage is spotlighting the South of Market neighborhood, part of its Heritage in the Neighborhoods program.
