LETTERS FROM THE AGNO

After burning
MARCH L FIANZA

After the fires come new things. My parents’ house, one of the oldest houses in New Lucban caught fire in 1962. Everything was leveled to the ground. It was a beautiful antique wooden house built after the war, which was inherited from my grandparents. I spent my early years running in the flower gardens around that house. Fires leave us no choice but to rebuild and that was exactly what my father did.

People who have seen the Baguio market grow and expand over the years would say in jest that were it not for the accidental fires, it would not have new buildings.
Seriously, that observation may be true.

In the summer of ‘77, our family was at the wedding reception of an uncle when suddenly, the men and women assigned as butchers and food servers scampered away. There was good reason for them to dash off because of the bad news that the big buildings along Magsaysay-Lakandula-Soliman-Lapulapu streets were on fire.
I found out later that many of them were owners of stalls in the market, especially at the vegetable section. What was left of the big fire became popularly known as the “Burned Area.”

More areas in the market were destroyed by fire of unknown causes. After the Burned Area incident, the building between Lakandula and Gen. Luna streets that housed People’s Restaurant, Robia Construction, Alpha Electronics, Lucky Lodge and other stores went up in smoke.

The next building also burned later. These fires gave way to the construction of a second Tiong San Bazaar, the Belfrandt Hotel and the Shoppers Lane . The Baguio Center Mall now occupies the infamous Burned Area.

Just a few weeks after a part of the University of Baguio and Tiong San Harrison went ablaze, the sari-sari section adjacent to the stone building burned down. City officials were quick in pointing out that good things are expected from unforeseen disasters.

With the recent incident, city planners can now move and present to a skeptical public new market plans. In fact, City Administrator Pete Fianza confirmed last week that an initial one-storey building strong enough to carry additional floors will be constructed at the burned site, in time for Baguio Day on September 1st.

Indeed, the latest fire came as an opportunity to lay out the proposed building two meters away from the edge of the existing sidewalk to provide for a wider loading-unloading frontage. Admin Pete sees this as a positive move to loosen traffic in that section.

Perhaps when the city finishes this new project, it can now start demolishing the old market buildings nearby. As soon as resources allow, the city can now rebuild following the road line set by the first building. Certainly, this development will make many sectors happy as the new buildings with additional floors and wider frontages can accommodate more leaseholders.

This was mentioned in earlier columns. I said privately-owned motor vehicles occupy the right side of the road from the Dimalanta overpass up to the burned sari-sari section from morning till night. This effectively constricts traffic flow that not even the presence of a dozen or more cops can loosen it.

I also mentioned that sometimes our traffic cops act as if they were “watch-your-car” boys or private security guards for private cars parked in front of the market stretch. Well, when the new buildings with wider frontages are finally built and a fresh market activity prospers, our traffic cops will surely have an easier task. Of course our police chiefs will no longer have bad traffic headaches so they can spend more time in the golf fairways. -- marchfianza777@yahoo.com