The legacy of Baguio: Burnham, baseball and Boracay
I’m taking a break from my Dream Homes series for a few weekends to celebrate places, structures, and institutions marking their anniversaries. We start with Baguio, which celebrates its centennial this month.
I was invited by the chairman of the National Historical Institute to deliver a paper at a historical conference on Baguio at the Teachers Camp recently. The audience was made up of public school teachers from all over the Cordillera. They were a great bunch eager to absorb in-depth research from us speakers, mostly from the academe, on Baguio and its historical legacies.
I spoke on three of the legacies of Baguio — Burnham, baseball, and Boracay. OK, the first two are the actual legacies while Boracay is symbolic of a lost legacy — the crown of the “Summer Capital.” I excerpt and condense below from my paper; and mostly from the second legacy, which I have not tackled in my column before.
Much has been written about Daniel H. Burnham and his designs for Manila and Baguio. The city was an American invention meant mainly for central government but today has evolved to a regional Philippine urban center fraught with all the problems that beset our booming and growing number of metropolitan conurbations. This origin and evolution has provided its historical legacy to the country, the region, and the world.
Baguio’s is Daniel H. Burnham and a legacy of modern towns and cities, which were the product of a new profession called city planning. The Manila and Baguio master plans Burnham made preceded and informed his other plans that followed; and these include plans for San Francisco and Chicago, which celebrates the centennial of its master plan by Burnham.
San Francisco’s plan was never implemented because of the horrific earthquake of 1905. Chicago’s was and what we see today in modern successful Chicago is the product of a hundred years of adherence to “big plans” presented by Burnham and regularly updated by those planners who followed him.
Baguio gained a reputation as a hill station in the 1910s and 1920s. French and British planners visited to study the summer capital and went back to their colonial territories to build along similar lines in Vietnam and Malaysia. Hill stations in Danang and the Cameron Highlands used Baguio as a model.
Chicago, Vietnam, and Malaysia then owed a debt of gratitude to the city of Baguio, along with the planners and administrators who kept the place fit and fantastic, at least until the 1970s.
It Takes An Olympic Village
What most people are not aware of, however, is another type of debt, the country and the Far East owe to Baguio and that is baseball, among other western sports.
The quintessential American game was brought to Manila by the troops in the Philippine-American war. The popular adoption of the game, along with other American and western ports had to wait until a few hundred Filipino clerks were bored to death in the new colonial hill station of Bagiuo in 1910.
In the article “Modern athletics in the Far East” (1918 edition of the World’s Work magazine), writer Thomas Gregory states that the introduction of modern Olympic athletics to the Far East and the resulting international goodwill are “one result of American occupancy of the Philippines.” Gregory was reporting on the success of the staging of three Far East Olympic meets in Manila in 1913, Shanghai in 1915, and Tokyo in 1917.
Gregory attributes the origins of this successful athletic movement to Baguio. He reports, “It began among the government clerks who worked in Baguio, the summer capital of the Philippine Islands. During the hot months the American government moves to Baguio in Northern Luzon, and 500 native clerks went there reluctantly. They did not object to the heat, but they did object to leaving gay Manila for dull Baguio every summer.” The problem manifested itself in 1910, a year after the chartering of the city.
Village People
Governor Cameron Forbes solved the problem by “borrowing” Elwood S. Brown of the YMCA from the association’s Manila headquarters, and sending him up to Baguio to organize sports activities for these clerks the next summer. Brown’s programs for baseball, basketball, volleyball, and tennis were a hit. Immediately after the clerks returned to Manila , an Inter-Bureau Athletic Association was set up. The Bureau of Education followed suit and integrated group athletics into its program. By 1918, there were 30,000 Filipino girls and another 30,000 Filipino boys playing baseball, volleyball, tennis, and other outdoor organized sports.
The success with the government bureaus, and then with the schools, led to the formation of the Philippine Amateur Athletic Federation in 1911. This led to the first successful annual athletic games for the Philippine Islands. The interest in the games extended beyond our shores and in 1912, the Japanese and Chinese were invited to participate in events that included tennis, track, swimming, volleyball, and baseball.
The events were so popular that the first Olympic Games for the Far East were held in Manila in 1913. The Japanese and Chinese sent larger delegations in a successful initial staging of the event. Following this, Elwood Brown went to China, Japan, Siam (Thailand), Java (Indonesia), and Malaysia to promote the event and to set up the Far East Athletic Association.
In 1915, the Chinese hosted another successful edition of the event in Shanghai, now under the auspices of the new regional association. Then came the third staging of the event in Japan — with its tumultuous reception by spectators and the press. The now regular games led to an awakening of region-wide interest in organized sports and the spread of western games in the Orient. The origins of national frenzy in baseball, for example, in Japan and Taiwan today, can be traced to the Philippines and by this narrative to Baguio.
Gregory ended his article with an assessment: “This (interest for athletics) is perhaps the most important effect that our occupation of the Philippines has had upon the Far East. Just as the old Olympic Games, begun by one village, grew to be the great recurring event at which all the Hellenic peoples could meet in peaceful competition, so has this modern athletic movement, starting from Baguio, spread to other Far Eastern peoples, and given them not only a ground for friendly meeting but also a basis for genuine respect and mutual understanding.”
Baguio, The Last Half Century
Sports and summer respite were the hallmark of the city until the tragedy of World War II. Baguio suffered much damage, but recovery started soon after independence. The recovery years also held off the hundreds of thousands that started to climb up from Manila in the 1960s when highways and an increasing middle class were able to afford cars and annual summer jaunts to the cool summer city.
The problems of increased local tourism grew in the 1970s when the north diversion road was completed and more hotels were built. The government’s infrastructure and local divisive politics were no help either. More land was opened up for urban development and the city started to gain evidence of the nationwide phenomena of squatter settlements.
The 1980s saw more of these urban problems as the city’s population grew, driven also by the establishment of the city as the educational center of the region.
The twin disasters of the early 1990s left Baguio traumatized. By then, too, visitor numbers had run to the hundreds of thousands yearly despite the perennial lack of water and the unreliability of Kennon Road or air travel. Recovery in the heyday of the mid-’90s was swift. Too swift, in fact, that high-rises sprung up without much thought to the deficiencies of road infrastructure and the debilitating lack of parking space in the inner city areas. If not for the economic crisis of the late ’90s, the city would have been overrun by malls, condominiums, and concrete. By this time, too, the informal settlements had recovered and repopulated dangerous slopes in and around the city. Formal settlements also spread unabated by terrain or any rational planning.
Today, Baguio faces a host of problems that plague all of our major urban centers. Traffic is addressed with the default, but useless, solution of flyovers and widening of roads. Jeepneys are still allowed in the city, which reeks of diesel fumes and the noise of thousands of PUJs, tricycles, and uncontrolled karaoke joints. Informal settlers continue to plant themselves on the slopes — with shanties competing with billboards to replace pine trees and vistas.
Patrimony or Profit?
What is happening, too, is the privatization of government properties with the least amount of control over what replaces century-old architecture or the pine trees and open space. Sure, there are some bright spots. The Heritage Conservation Society has helped bring the old Teacher’s Camp back to its former glory. The old High School was also a conservation project. But these examples are the exception rather than the rule.
Profit now drives Baguio and fewer tourists drive up. Why would they, when tour packages overseas are cheaper? Why struggle to smell the remnants of pine trees, when the scent of pine is stronger from your car air conditioner as you drive endlessly around the city to find parking?
What Baguio needs is a serious physical makeover. This entails hard pills to swallow, like reducing zoning densities, removing structures (and settlers) from all dangerous slopes and easements, rationalizing vehicular access (read: banning cars and jeepneys from the center), and recreating the vision of Burnham for the 21st century.
The City of Pines can be a fine city once more, but only by comprehensive urban design within an economic, social, environmental, and regional context. A Metro-Baguio governance is also needed as the city, like Metro Manila, is a mishmash of overlapping jurisdictions, political sensitivities, and environmental tragedies waiting to happen. If Baguio does not fix itself now, then the storied hill station will be nothing but a mountain of woe, a legacy lost forever, and the uncontested bummer capital of the Philippines.
* * *
Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at Paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.
