Ab urbe condita; A paean for Baguio City

EDITORIAL     

I am soft sift

In an hourglass – at the wall

Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift

And it crowds and it combs to the fall…

G.M. Hopkins –The wreck of the Deutchland

The Romans reckoned time from the founding of their city. So can we. Only difference between us is that we have no myth, legend or romance to hide our true origins.

As a rest and recreation center, we were originally the Spaniard’s idea. They took careful records of our weather, topography, our seasons. Eventually, as the song goes, we were made in USA.

It was a Dean Connant Worcester who wanted to check on a fantastic story told him in Mindanao about a place in the northern mountains of Luzon where pine trees and wild oaks grew in profusion at a certain elevation. The same person who soon after rode a horse up Naguillian Trail stayed for a few days with a German settler Otto Scheener, like it, and on the strength of his being a member of the Philippine Commission, recommended that the place, Kafagway to the native Ibaloi, be developed.

Worcester it was who finally got Washington’s nod for certain large amount over the objection of those in the military who wanted the biggest cut into the national budget

After three years and several false starts, the Benguet Road was finally completed by Col. Lyman Kennon, the core of the city was laid out by Architect Daniel Burnham, and on September 1, 1909, we were formally presented a special charter as a city with an honorific that lasted us to this very day, the Summer Capital of the Philippines.

So we are 94 years ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city. But just a s Rome wasn’t built in a day, so weren’t we. We began to build around the Burnham Plan which projected growth for the city until it reached a population of 30,000 souls.

We then had to rely on the slim but effective political structure provided for by the late Justice George Malcolm in the city charter until World War II caught up with us. The Japanese Imperial Army funneled throughout the city in their retreat to the north the Americans has no recourse but to bomb the city which they have founded.

There was nothing to build on from the ruin of the liberation. There was the lay-out made by Daniel Burnham, but the period of reconstruction followed no definite planning. The national government itself was in debt. The city coffers could hardly pay for the salaries of its employees. People came back to the city in droves, build where they may, their main preoccupation being their survival.

The absence of an effective plan to put us back to our feet drew that snide remark that our city, henceforth, “simply grew and grew”, up to the very day.

There is that nostalgia of an older generation which would want to turn back the hands of time and restore city life to the serenity of pistaym.

There is that hard-nose pragmatism of a newer generation that would want to expand the opportunities lost to us, even to include the mistakes of those to survived  in the city’s leadership through sheer political will, but with little economic foresight.

And there are those who are resigned to their fate who measure their future with the numbers of relatives they have abroad or how many square meters of land we can eke for our children, and leave the city to itself as a monument to a time that was.

It can be truly said, however, that the City of Baguio has expanded was beyond its boundaries. The native has gone abroad: San Diego, LA, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Miami, London, Stockholm, Madrid, Rome, Davao, Cebu, Manila. To adopt a trucking phrase: Points anywhere in the Philippines.

The native has joined the elite of professions: bankers, lawyers, corporate managers, accountant, priests, doctors, scientists, journalists, politicians. They have subsequently impressed their marks on everything that they do, everything that they have become.

If there is anything the native abroad would want the world to know is that he is what has come to be known as a “Baguio Boy”.

There are those who came back, of course, even only for a time, only to resuscitate that part of their spirits that co-mingle with others in the past.

They comment on how Baguio has changed since their time. They are not talking about the higher, more architecturally elaborate buildings that have since risen; the number of unfamiliar faces that they meet on the street; the tighter spaces between houses.

They have been that everywhere they have traveled. But because the native too has changed, Baguio has really grown like everything else in the world. Its evolution has retained only those features which can have survived the rapid development of urbanization and technology. Its evolution has built a strong and determined spirit in the heart and soul of the native to succeed ion everything he does.

So the growth of the city from its founding to the present must not be judged by what it has brought into the world and reared.

Baguio on the move is its people moving centrifugally as it were into far-flung places or near, anywhere in the world.

(This editorial was written by Freddie G. Mayo some decades ago. Mayo was one of the best print and broadcast journalists of Baguio and the Cordillera who was also staff of Baguio mayors. As the city celebrates its 110th founding anniversary we print it in honor of one of Baguio’s good sons who have since passed away. This piece may have been done years ago, but the words ring true and still mirror the Baguio of old. -- ed)