The Ambassador Hotel was the ‘last stop’ before the streets. And, for many, before death.
The exterior of the Ambassador Hotel in San Francisco on June 27, 2024. The hotel sheltered and treated AIDS patients at the height of the AIDS crisis.Douglas Zimmerman/SFGATE
By Timothy Karoff,Culture Reporter July 14, 2024 (SFGate.com)
Thirty years later, Tom Calvanese still remembers watching his boss get clocked in the face.
It was “check day” at the Ambassador Hotel, the Tenderloin SRO where Calvanese worked as an assistant manager in the early 1990s. Many of the hotel’s residents did not have bank accounts, so once every month they gathered in the hotel’s lobby, where Calvanese and his boss, Hank Wilson, cashed their general assistance and social security checks. Check days were always chaotic. But on this day, chaos boiled over into violence when a resident sucker punched Wilson, breaking his glasses and cutting his face.
Most hotel managers would have swept a violent guest out the door, but Wilson betrayed no anger. Instead, he simply picked up his glasses and walked away. After a few minutes, he returned to the front desk and got back to cashing checks.
It’s the sort of episode that earned Wilson, who was a lifelong AIDS activist, a standing of saintliness — a reputation that made him the subject of a documentary in 2019, called “Thanks to Hank,” and led the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to name him “Saint Hank” in 1998. (The Sisters have a custom of “sainting” notable Bay Area LGBTQ heroes; other saints include Harvey Milk and Margaret Cho.) Even as Wilson lived without a bed in a cockroach-infested apartment, his hotel on Mason Street sheltered hundreds with nowhere else to turn.
After the Ambassador completed a multimillion dollar renovation in 2023, its doors are open once more. Even after the upgrade, the building still houses extremely low-income San Franciscans (rooms rent for $700 a month; maximum incomes range from $39,350 to $60,500). Today, it’s one of several single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings that still pack the Tenderloin’s blocks. Most of the buildings are old hotels whose rooms converted to affordable housing units, often with shared bathrooms; today, they comprise most of the city’s remaining stock of truly affordable housing.
It’s a fitting development for the historic hotel, which was a local hotspot at the height of the AIDS crisis. For many who used drugs or were sick with AIDS, the Ambassador was not just a place to go — it was THE place to go.
‘The last stop’
“We heard that often,” Calvanese told SFGATE. “People were like, ‘You’re the last stop, man.’ Like, if they can’t make it at the Ambassador, that’s the last stop. Where are they going to go from there? There’s nowhere for them.”
In one of the darkest periods of the city’s history, the Ambassador provided the beds where San Francisco’s most vulnerable slept — and sometimes, where they died.
Located at the corner of Eddy and Mason, the century-old brick building’s facade looks like an artifact from a decadent pre-Depression San Francisco. A vertical neon sign juts from the corner of its brick facade, recalling the look of an old-school movie theater; before it turned into an SRO, brochures once advertised the hotel to tourists as a high-class place to stay. Before it was renovated, 150 small, single-occupancy rooms lined its long hallways.
Under Wilson’s management, the hotel was unique in its unwavering endeavor to house the city’s most vulnerable populations: LGBTQ youths and people who used drugs or were formerly incarcerated.
There was no shortage of characters. There was Nicoletta, an old Greek woman who served as the hotel’s unofficial matriarch. She had her own leather chair in the lobby, and others had to vacate it for her when she came down the elevator. Otherwise, there were consequences.
“She had a cane and she used it,” Calvanese said.
There was another man named Geronimo, who gathered leftover produce from the farmers market and distributed it among residents.
And then, of course, there was Hank Wilson, whom residents nicknamed “Mr. Ambassador Hotel.” Twice a day, Wilson made the rounds with his clipboard, meticulously checking valves, lights and toilets. He gave out plants and Ghirardelli chocolates, which he scored for cheap at the food bank.
The Ambassador may be most notable, though, in how it welcomed people with AIDS at a time when stigma surrounding the illness was at its peak. As formerly healthy men grew too weak to care for themselves, in-house nurses did rounds of the building. When residents died — sometimes several in a single day — ministers held memorial services in an empty room. On occasion, the hotel’s staff held residents’ hands in their last moments.
Calvanese said that at one point in the early ’90s, the hotel housed approximately 200 people with AIDS.
“At that time, the Ambassador Hotel was housing more people with AIDS than anywhere else in the country,” he claimed.
‘Sort of Johnny Appleseed’
Wilson “was a sort of Johnny Appleseed of gay and lesbian organizing: wherever he went organizations sprouted,” wrote San Francisco writer and musician Bob Ostertag, a friend of Wilson’s, in a tribute.
The Ambassador Hotel was one in a dizzying line of Wilson’s projects, many of which persist in San Francisco to this day. Wilson co-founded the group that evolved into the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club, as well as Frameline, the largest and longest-running LGBTQ film festival in the world. He ran a gay community center on Page Street, and he had a hand in founding several AIDS advocacy groups and Community United Against Violence. He was one of the organizers of San Francisco’s first AIDS Candlelight Vigil in 1983.
“Saint Hank’s holistic community visionary work cannot be appreciated enough, from the many lives he saved as well as being the voice of reason for our communities, which have always been surviving cultural, and faith-based hate,” Sister Kitty Catalyst of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence told SFGATE.
The “Saint Hank” moniker alludes to Wilson’s activism, but it could just as easily describe Wilson’s Spartan, borderline ascetic lifestyle. Even as he managed a hotel, a gay community center, a cabaret and several community organizations, he shared a one-room Market Street apartment with cockroaches. He had no bed, and his glasses were taped together.
“I think he enjoyed living on nothing,” Ostertag, who made the “Thanks to Hank” documentary, told SFGATE. “It was like a fun game for him to see how little he needed.”
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‘Nobody wanted to house people with AIDS’
When Wilson and his business partner first leased the Ambassador in 1978, scores of LGBTQ youths were arriving at the city’s Greyhound station every day, Ostertag said. Wilson envisioned the hotel as a cheap, secure shelter for these young transplants with nowhere to stay.
The hotel started out as “a complete wreck,” said Ostertag, with doors hanging off of their hinges and rooms furnished with discount furniture.
Under Wilson, the hotel was a shelter, not a business. Tony King, who worked at the hotel from 1978 to the mid-’80s, recalled one resident who refused to pay rent: “Hank ended up giving him break after break. Then he evicted him. Then, of course a month or two later, he felt bad and brought him back in.”
In 1981, something strange and terrible began to take place in San Francisco. Healthy people, often gay men, suddenly grew ill and died, sometimes within the span of a few months. First, doctors termed the illness GRID: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Soon, it acquired its permanent name: AIDS. In San Francisco’s gay community, lovers, friends and role models fell deathly ill, as if suddenly stricken by a curse. The city’s gay newspapers began cutting the sizes of obituaries to fit all of the deaths.
“You would see it in the Castro: Young men looking like they were 90 years old, being pushed around in wheelchairs,” Ostertag said.
In the panic surrounding the new, mysterious disease, whose means of transmission were unknown, stigma against people with HIV and AIDS grew. Some people refused to share swimming pools with HIV-positive men. That stigma leaked into housing.
“Nobody wanted to house people with AIDS,” King said.
Or, almost nobody. King said that he and Wilson spoke privately, and agreed to discreetly host people with AIDS at the Ambassador.
“It was kind of a secret for a long time between him and myself,” King said.
When Calvanese began working at the hotel in 1989, about 20 or 30 residents had AIDS, he said. Within a year or two, that number had multiplied several times over.
At the height of the crisis, the Ambassador bore as much resemblance to a sanatorium as it did to a hotel, with an entire wing set aside for health services. An on-site nursing service called AIDS Indigent Direct Services (A.I.D.S.) operated out of hotel room 214. Another group, Visiting Nurses and Hospice, administered hospice care. Project Open Hand delivered hot meals door to door, and volunteers from the Shanti Project assisted residents with basic tasks, like laundry.
The hotel’s services weren’t just medical. Penny Sarvis, who worked as a minister for San Francisco Network Ministries, was tapped to provide spiritual support for the hotel’s residents. She went from room to room holding conversations. Every afternoon, she and another visiting minister set up coffee and cookies in an empty room, called the listening post, for informal group chats.
“What people wanted was someone to talk to,” she said.
Another thing that set the Ambassador apart was its laissez-faire approach to drug use. Long before harm reduction became a common approach to drug treatment, Wilson and his staff were putting its underlying principles into practice, providing unconditional housing and medical care. One resident even organized an in-house syringe exchange to keep users from sharing needles, a common means of HIV transmission.
“We thought, well, we either bring him to the Ambassador or he will be on the streets,” said one social worker about a client who used drugs in a 1994 KRON-TV documentary about the hotel. “The Ambassador is probably not at all the best place for anybody to be. But with his drug problem he will be able to be here and have his drugs if he wants to. But at the same time he will receive basic medical care. He will be able to have access to us very easily.”
As a result, the hotel developed a reputation among social agencies. Parole officers, prisons, AIDS groups and drug treatment programs all referred people to the hotel, cementing its place as the “last stop.”
‘They would just disintegrate’
The Ambassador wasn’t just the “last stop” between an AIDS patient and the Tenderloin’s streets. It was also, for many, the last stop in life.
In his nine years at the hotel, Calvanese kept a running list of the names of all of the people who had died; by the time he left the hotel in 1996, the list numbered in the hundreds. On his first day on the job, he stumbled upon a resident’s body in Room 202.
“Even right now, just talking to you, I’m starting to have little flashbacks like in my mind,” he said. “I’m just starting to see all these pieces of these people that I knew. I was with many people when they died.”
“They would just disintegrate in front of you,” Donna Lisa Stewart, a former manager at the hotel, said in Ostertag’s documentary. “In other words, you’d have this healthy young man come in … we’d give him a room, and within six months, they were down to skeletons and dead.”
One year, Sarvis and the other ministers held 40 memorial services. Residents gathered in the listening post to share what the person meant to them.
“That kind of remembering people — who often basically were pretty forgotten, pretty much extricated from families and churches, all of that — was critical,” Sarvis said.
One day, a man walked into the Ambassador’s lobby. He had been searching for his estranged brother, who had left the family years earlier, and heard from someone that he might be living at the hotel. The front desk clerk pointed him upstairs, to the listening post; the man had died of AIDS, and the memorial service was in progress.
“The guy came up and joined our circle, and he said, ‘You know, it’s been a couple years since I saw my brother. I don’t know how he left, or what was going on,’” Sarvis recalled. People in the circle shared their memories with him and filled in the gaps.
AIDS wasn’t the only danger. Violence, trained at both residents and staff, was common. Calvanese recalled dodging knives and bullets. Once, someone even swung a piece of rebar at him (“I have good reflexes,” he said). On King’s first night at the Ambassador, someone hit him from behind with a flowerpot.
In spite of the pain and occasional bouts of violence, Calvanese also remembered the Ambassador as a loose, unpredictable community — like an entire neighborhood folded into a boxy brick building.
And like any neighborhood, the Ambassador had its share of conflict, community and ecstasy.
“There was a lot of f—king sex in that building,” Calvanese recalled. “A lot.”
The Ambassador’s ambassador
It wasn’t just the residents who battled AIDS. Wilson was HIV-positive. While managing the hotel, he survived a brief brush with death.
In 1996, Wilson left San Francisco and the Ambassador Hotel behind to care for his ailing parents in Sacramento. Shortly after he left the hotel, its conditions deteriorated. Residents rallied for the city to purchase the hotel, and a few years later, the nonprofit Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation acquired it, allowing it to permanently remain as low-income housing. TNDC still manages the hotel.
By the early 2000s, Wilson had returned to San Francisco. He survived AIDS, but died of lung cancer in 2008.
There is no Hank Wilson plaza in San Francisco. For someone whose fingerprints are all over the city, Wilson’s name retains an if-you-know-you-know status among his surviving friends and colleagues. Saint Hank remains unfamiliar to new generations of San Franciscans, but among those that were there, his local hero status is a simple fact.
According to Ostertag, that was by design. “He did not want any congratulations,” he said.
In at least one respect, then, the newly managed hotel thwarted Wilson’s desires. When TNDC finished renovating the century-old building, the organization added a plaque, as well as a technicolor mural of Hank Wilson. Now, as residents filter in and out of the elevator, they’re greeted by Wilson’s face, with rays of light shooting from his head like a medieval halo.
As for King, he still lives in the hotel, just as he has since 1978, the year that Wilson took over — a short elevator ride away from the spot where someone hit him with a flowerpot 46 years ago.
“I haven’t gone anywhere,” he said. “Because I’m very comfortable here.”
July 14, 2024
CULTURE REPORTER
Timothy Karoff is SFGATE’s culture reporter. He lives in San Francisco’s Mission District. You can email him at timothy.karoff@sfgate.com
