Beyond the Big Dome

Launched on February 26 at Gateway’s Mandarin Suites was the coffee-table book Araneta Center: The Big Dome and Beyond, published by J. Amado Araneta Foundation, designed by Felix Mago Miguel, and co-authored by this writer and fellow Philippine STAR columnist Paulo Alcazaren. (The collaboration is a signal honor, maybe something to tell our grandkids about, although it was actually conducted in serial fashion.)

Sometimes a coffee-table book takes all of several years to complete, owing to the subject’s continuing dynamism. This has been the case with this glossy, 264-page anthology of vintage and color photographs as well as multi-voiced text, the idea for which was first tossed around in meetings held as far back as 2002.

Eventually this writer-editor was contracted by the ever-gracious Judy Araneta Roxas to put everything together, under the guidance of Mimi de Jesus who would be credited as executive editor. We threshed out the conceptual framework for the book. It would be a testament to one man’s vision, for one, that man being Don Amado, to whom all of present-day commercial Cubao owes its provenance. It would trace the timeline of the Araneta Center’s development, parallel with what that meant to countless Filipinos.

We settled on assigning a thematic focus each to various notable writers as contributors on the Center’s history and progress. This writer became responsible for the running essay that threaded through the assigned theme pieces.

Part of the prologue ran thus:

“A man’s vision sometimes turns into reality. And if fortune shines further on his idea, it becomes a legacy. Such has been the happy fate of that initial gleam in J. Amado Araneta’s eye, which likely shone one fine day in the early 1950s when he stood surveying an expanse of land so distant at the time from the city proper that was Manila.

“The notion was not something one plucked from thin air, even of the pure sort that must have pervaded the remote Cubao area, then crisscrossed by two avenues that had been barely built, and still rather infrequently traveled.

“Gazing at the radio transmission towers lording it over the vastness of cogon fields, he must have intuited a rise in the future that would be more than just vertical or physical. He saw the likelihood of great commerce developing around that inevitably major intersection that would surely see better infrastructure in the future.

“Manila would be congested, and President Manuel L. Quezon’s dream of a capital city would take considerable shape.

“He, J. Amado Araneta, businessman, could help that dream along by investing in the bright future now. He could take possession of that empty expanse and turn it into a modern marketplace, a center for entrepreneurship, recreation, and entertainment.

...“In this book, we trace the development of what has become a model vision cum mission of serving the Filipino public in an initially grandiose yet highly populist manner. Several distinguished writers recount the history of Araneta Center, involving all its sundry facets. Its story has passed on to legend and legacy, and with this book we hope it now becomes even more recognizable, and commendable — how one man’s vision started it all, sustained its steadfast direction and development, and ultimately institutionalized a dream that turned into reality.

“That dream and its wondrous offshoots are still evolving, as befits great institutions. The Araneta Center is a living, breathing example of how the Filipino can achieve something far beyond personal triumph, and share the result with millions of his countrymen.” 

Quite an assembly of writers agreed to join in and take on the sectioned assignments.

Jose Y. Dalisay Jr. led off with “My Comfort Zone”: “The Cubao I knew as a teenager in the late ’60s and early ’70s was a cornucopia of wonders and delights. This was where my parents took me to watch Flash Elorde, Harry Belafonte and Herman’s Hermits at the Araneta Coliseum, where I learned to play hooky and shoot billiards at the Fun Center, where I danced the bugaloo at the Aristocrat with someone I could have sworn was the prettiest girl in the world in 1968, where I took my first girlfriend (no, not my dancemate) on my first date to see Ryan’s Daughter at the New Frontier Theatre, and where I proposed to my wife-to-be (no, not my first girlfriend) at Skorpio’s Restaurant as a precocious nineteen-er.” 

Antonio A. Hidalgo wrote on “Renewing Old Ties”: “Cubao has always filled many of my needs, and that of my family’s as well. I might say that Cubao is one of my oldest friends, she and I having matured and grown old together.”   

In “Hatao, Cubao!” Erwin E. Castillo harked back to his boyhood days in Project 4, when “Aurora Boulevard was a dusty provincial road that bounced past empty fields littered with rusting relics from the late war: helmets, vehicle and weapons parts.”

He recalled as well: “Where the Araneta commercial center would later rise was a huge meadow of scrub grass, burnt sienna in the summer, with little ponds of standing water where the Santa Mesa boys took their carabaos to pasture and wallow. For a week in one particular year the herders shared the meadow with thousands of Boy Scouts, a-jangle with surplus bayonets, web belts, mess kits and canteens, on a national jamboree. The meadow was olive and khaki with uniforms and tents, the air delirious with semaphore flags and signal fires sending out unintelligible secret messages.”

For this first section titled “One Man’s Vision,” Senator Mar A. Roxas contributed “Recollections of My Grandfather”:

“Looking back, now I know how the Araneta Center has become what it is today. It is because the vision was truly great. But more than that, it is because the hands that worked towards that vision achieved even greater things; those firm, tender hands of Wowo Amading that from time to time he laid on my shoulder, those hands that never shied away from shaking someone else’s hand regardless of whether they belonged to the high and mighty, or to the everyday Filipino.

“What I treasure most about my memory of Wowo Amading is that he kept his counsel, he played fair, and he was very much ahead of his time.”

For the next section on “The Big Dome,” Augusto Villalon writes in “It All Starts with the Big Dome”: “Although unquestionably the centerpiece of the area, its reputation has broken out of its Cubao confines. It’s been there long enough that at any point in a Manileño’s existence, or any Filipino life for that matter, the Big Dome was where he or she experienced at least one memorable, significant, life-defining event...

“The place is deep in the memory of so many Filipinos that it is stamped in our collective consciousness.... It is a place that has touched so many lives that it deserves to be part of our national heritage.” 

Recah Trinidad weighs in on the “Sports Events” that have since timelined the Big Dome, starting with Flash Elorde’s momentous 7th-round kayo of Harold Gomes on March 16, 1960, the day the Araneta Coliseum first opened its gates.

Nestor U. Torre writes about “Showing the Way to Entertainment.” Peachy Y. Yamsuan hails the Coliseum as a spiritual venue in “Center of Faith.” Marla Yotoko Chorengel’s piece is on “Celebrating Christmas” as signaled by “Ten thousand and one Tivoli lights of a towering Araneta Christmas Tree... lit ceremoniously every November...”

In the section titled “The Hub,” Alya B. Honasan contributes “Of Malls and Milestones.” Randy David plumbs the sociology of Cubao with “Democratizing Leisure.” The late lamented Doreen G. Fernandez delights with “Food Country: Barbecue to Bola.” Lydia D. Castillo pitches in with “A Shopping Mecca.” And Mario M. Taguiwalo completes the picture by dwelling on “Crossings and Connections.”

The last two sections are on “The Gateway” — the major reason why the book had to await completion. Our neighbor (in more ways than one) Paulo Alcazaren, who was also responsible for the book’s front cover photograph, takes over from here. He writes a major essay titled “Renaissance of the Araneta Center,” with Gary P. Sims also contributing with “The Oasis: An Urban Landscaping Approach.”

Finally, Paulo offers the last words for the Epilogue: “From its now distant beginnings as a lonely intersection, Cubao and the Araneta Center have evolved into a prime urban district. Their distinctive character, now carried with such civic pride, is more equitably and popularly shared by visitors and nearby residents than in other places in the metropolis.

“... The specificity of its site, the landmark and heritage status of its Big Dome and the multi-class nature of the demographic it serves are perennial come-ons.

“More importantly, the Araneta Center’s progressive and forward-thinking business leaders have taken real-estate development beyond the practice of simply looking at the bottom line. The Araneta Center is synonymous with Cubao and Quezon City. Its growth has and will continue to drive the city’s own resurgence and fulfill the visions of both founders — Manuel L. Quezon and J. Amado Araneta.”

It has been nearly half-a-century since the Araneta Center narrative began. Now we have a book that celebrates all of that contemporary history — of pioneering in serving up a model of development that also glories in servicing the great good public.

Jorge L Araneta encapsulates it in his Foreword: “We ourselves are happy and proud that the past and the future meet at a crossroad that my father recognized as his field of dreams for sharing with every Filipino.”