{"id":34862,"date":"2024-07-15T11:40:58","date_gmt":"2024-07-15T18:40:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=34862"},"modified":"2024-07-15T11:41:00","modified_gmt":"2024-07-15T18:41:00","slug":"in-san-franciscos-darkest-chapter-this-hotel-was-the-last-stop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/07\/15\/in-san-franciscos-darkest-chapter-this-hotel-was-the-last-stop\/","title":{"rendered":"In San Francisco’s darkest chapter, this hotel was the ‘last stop’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Ambassador Hotel was the ‘last stop’ before the streets. And, for many, before death.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By\u00a0Timothy Karoff<\/a>,Culture Reporter July 14, 2024 (SFGate.com)<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thirty years later, Tom Calvanese still remembers watching his boss get clocked in the face. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was \u201ccheck day\u201d at the Ambassador Hotel, the Tenderloin SRO<\/a> where Calvanese worked as an assistant manager in the early 1990s. Many of the hotel\u2019s residents did not have bank accounts, so once every month they gathered in the hotel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s the sort of episode that earned Wilson, who was a lifelong AIDS activist, a standing of saintliness \u2014 a reputation that made him the subject of a documentary in 2019, called\u00a0\u201cThanks to Hank,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and led the\u00a0Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence<\/a>\u00a0to name him \u201cSaint Hank\u201d in 1998. (The Sisters have a custom of \u201csainting\u201d notable Bay Area LGBTQ heroes; other saints include\u00a0Harvey Milk<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Margaret Cho<\/a>.) Even as Wilson lived without a bed in a cockroach-infested apartment, his hotel on Mason Street sheltered hundreds with nowhere else to turn.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s one of several single-room occupancy (SRO) buildings that still pack the Tenderloin\u2019s 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\u2019s remaining stock of truly affordable housing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s 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 <\/em>place to go \u2014 it was THE <\/em>place to go. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018The last stop\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe heard that often,\u201d Calvanese told SFGATE. \u201cPeople were like, \u2018You\u2019re the last stop, man.\u2019 Like, if they can\u2019t make it at the Ambassador, that\u2019s the last stop. Where are they going to go from there? There\u2019s nowhere for them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one of the darkest periods of the city\u2019s history, the Ambassador provided the beds where San Francisco\u2019s most vulnerable slept \u2014 and sometimes, where they died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Located at the corner of Eddy and Mason, the century-old brick building\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Under Wilson\u2019s management, the hotel was unique in its unwavering endeavor to house the city\u2019s most vulnerable populations: LGBTQ youths and people who used drugs or were formerly incarcerated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no shortage of characters. There was Nicoletta, an old Greek woman who served as the hotel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe had a cane and she used it,\u201d Calvanese said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was another man named Geronimo, who gathered leftover produce from the farmers market and distributed it among residents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

And then, of course, there was Hank Wilson, whom residents nicknamed \u201cMr. Ambassador Hotel.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 sometimes several in a single day \u2014 ministers held memorial services in an empty room. On occasion, the hotel\u2019s staff held residents\u2019 hands in their last moments. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Calvanese said that at one point in the early \u201990s, the hotel housed approximately 200 people with AIDS. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAt that time, the Ambassador Hotel was housing more people with AIDS than anywhere else in the country,\u201d he claimed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Sort of Johnny Appleseed\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Wilson \u201cwas a sort of Johnny Appleseed of gay and lesbian organizing: wherever he went organizations sprouted,\u201d wrote San Francisco writer and musician Bob Ostertag, a friend of Wilson\u2019s, in a\u00a0tribute.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ambassador Hotel was one in a dizzying line of Wilson\u2019s 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<\/a>, 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\u2019s first AIDS Candlelight Vigil<\/a> in 1983.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cSaint Hank\u2019s 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,\u201d Sister Kitty Catalyst of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence told SFGATE.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cSaint Hank\u201d moniker alludes to Wilson\u2019s activism, but it could just as easily describe Wilson\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think he enjoyed living on nothing,\u201d Ostertag, who made the \u201cThanks to Hank\u201d documentary, told SFGATE. \u201cIt was like a fun game for him to see how little he needed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BEST OF SFGATE<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Culture <\/strong>| Jimi Hendrix’s psychedelic takeover of SF’s Golden Gate Park<\/a>
Travel<\/strong> | The legendary In-N-Out smack dab in the middle of California<\/a>
Local <\/strong>| The strange, fun and fascinating tales behind Bay Area city names<\/a>
Bay Area<\/strong> | How a piece of jewelry inspired the Bay Area’s most iconic logo<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Nobody wanted to house people with AIDS\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

When Wilson and his business partner first leased the Ambassador in 1978, scores of LGBTQ youths were arriving at the city\u2019s Greyhound station every day, Ostertag said. Wilson envisioned the hotel as a cheap, secure shelter for these young transplants with nowhere to stay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hotel started out as \u201ca complete wreck,\u201d said Ostertag, with doors hanging off of their hinges and rooms furnished with discount furniture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

Under Wilson, the hotel was a shelter, not a business. Tony King, who worked at the hotel from 1978 to the mid-\u201980s, recalled one resident who refused to pay rent: \u201cHank 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u00a0GRID<\/a>: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. Soon, it acquired its permanent name:\u00a0AIDS.<\/a>\u00a0In\u00a0San Francisco\u2019s gay community, lovers, friends and role models fell deathly ill<\/a>, as if suddenly stricken by a curse. The city\u2019s gay newspapers began cutting the sizes of obituaries to fit all of the deaths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou would see it in the Castro: Young men looking like they were 90 years old, being pushed around in wheelchairs,\u201d Ostertag said.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the panic surrounding the new, mysterious disease, whose means of transmission were unknown<\/a>, stigma against people with HIV and AIDS grew. Some people refused to share swimming<\/a> pools with HIV-positive men. That stigma leaked into housing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

\u201cNobody wanted to house people with AIDS,\u201d King said.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or, almost nobody. King said that he and Wilson spoke privately, and agreed to discreetly host people with AIDS at the Ambassador.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt was kind of a secret for a long time between him and myself,\u201d King said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.\u00a0Project Open Hand<\/a>\u00a0delivered hot meals door to door, and volunteers from the\u00a0Shanti Project<\/a>\u00a0assisted residents with basic tasks, like laundry.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

The hotel\u2019s services weren\u2019t just medical. Penny Sarvis, who worked as a minister for San Francisco Network Ministries, was tapped to provide spiritual support for the hotel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat people wanted was someone to talk to,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another thing that set the Ambassador apart was its laissez-faire approach to drug use. Long before\u00a0harm reduction<\/a>\u00a0became a common approach to drug treatment, Wilson and his staff were putting its\u00a0underlying principles<\/a>\u00a0into practice, providing unconditional housing and medical care. One resident even organized an in-house\u00a0syringe exchange<\/a>\u00a0to keep users from sharing needles, a\u00a0common means<\/a>\u00a0of HIV transmission.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe thought, well, we either bring him to the Ambassador or he will be on the streets,\u201d said one social worker about a client who used drugs in a 1994 KRON-TV documentary<\/a> about the hotel. \u201cThe 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.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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 \u201clast stop.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018They would just disintegrate\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Ambassador wasn\u2019t just the \u201clast stop\u201d between an AIDS patient and the Tenderloin\u2019s streets. It was also, for many, the last stop in life.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s body in Room 202.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEven right now, just talking to you, I\u2019m starting to have little flashbacks like in my mind,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m just starting to see all these pieces of these people that I knew. I was with many people when they died.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey would just disintegrate in front of you,\u201d Donna Lisa Stewart, a former manager at the hotel, said in Ostertag\u2019s documentary. \u201cIn other words, you\u2019d have this healthy young man come in \u2026 we\u2019d give him a room, and within six months, they were down to skeletons and dead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat kind of remembering people \u2014 who often basically were pretty forgotten, pretty much extricated from families and churches, all of that \u2014 was critical,\u201d Sarvis said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One day, a man walked into the Ambassador\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe guy came up and joined our circle, and he said, \u2018You know, it\u2019s been a couple years since I saw my brother. I don\u2019t know how he left, or what was going on,\u2019\u201d Sarvis recalled. People in the circle shared their memories with him and filled in the gaps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

AIDS wasn\u2019t 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 (\u201cI have good reflexes,\u201d he said). On King\u2019s first night at the Ambassador, someone hit him from behind with a flowerpot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In spite of the pain and occasional bouts of violence, Calvanese also remembered the Ambassador as a loose, unpredictable community \u2014 like an entire neighborhood folded into a boxy brick building. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And like any neighborhood, the Ambassador had its share of conflict, community and ecstasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was a lot of f\u2014king sex in that building,\u201d Calvanese recalled. \u201cA lot.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ambassador\u2019s ambassador<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It wasn\u2019t just the residents who battled AIDS. Wilson was HIV-positive. While managing the hotel, he survived a brief brush with death.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>. TNDC still manages the hotel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the early 2000s, Wilson had returned to San Francisco. He survived AIDS, but died of lung cancer<\/a> in 2008. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is no Hank Wilson plaza in San Francisco. For someone whose fingerprints are all over the city, Wilson\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Ostertag, that was by design. \u201cHe did not want any congratulations,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

In at least one respect, then, the newly managed hotel thwarted Wilson\u2019s desires. When TNDC finished renovating<\/a> 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\u2019re greeted by Wilson\u2019s face, with rays of light shooting from his head like a medieval halo<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As for King, he still lives in the hotel, just as he has since 1978, the year that Wilson took over \u2014 a short elevator ride away from the spot where someone hit him with a flowerpot 46 years ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI haven\u2019t gone anywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause I\u2019m very comfortable here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

July 14, 2024<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Timothy Karoff<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CULTURE REPORTER<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Timothy Karoff is SFGATE’s culture reporter. He lives in San Francisco’s Mission District. You can email him at timothy.karoff@sfgate.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u00a0Timothy Karoff,Culture Reporter July 14, 2024 (SFGate.com)… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34862"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34864,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34862\/revisions\/34864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}