A Christmas park
The 26th of December is a traditional holiday in commonwealth countries. In those countries, it was the day you gave gifts to trades people — laborers, postal workers, servants and to charity. Nowadays Boxing Day is a commercialized holiday and is extended to Boxing Week in some countries for discounted sales of items after Christmas. Of course, if you are Manny Pacquiao, every day is Boxing Day.
One of the knockout joys of the season decades ago in Manila was being able to enjoy the free delights of our de facto Central Park — the Luneta. Rizal Park, as it is officially known, was the site of Christmas festivities, concerts, and Christmas Day picnics. Today, the park has suffered from competition by malls.
Another reason is that in Rizal Park, as in other towns and cities countrywide, the open spaces formerly enjoyed by people during holidays have been usurped by redundant monuments and all manner of buildings, until almost no open green space is left to enjoy.
Thankfully, one city is reversing this loss of open green park and civic space — Pasig City. I was invited last week to the inauguration of Pasig’s new Central Park. The open green space forms the nucleus of an overall civic center redevelopment started by Mayor Bobby Eusebio two years ago. He had wanted to change the crowded City Hall complex and make it a clean, green and sustainable development, reflecting the larger aim of a green city.
Mayor Eusebio had asked me and my firm, PGAA Creative Design, to get involved in the makeover as urban designers and landscape architects. It was good to find a client who understood that park and civic open space design was the province of landscape architects. Many other clients are not aware of the scope and expertise of this profession. A number have hired building architects or civil engineers to design parks and open spaces (cases in point are the Quezon City Memorial Park, The Ninoy Aquino Parks and Wildlife Center and recently the parks in Ayala Alabang were awarded to non-landscape architects). I have nothing against architects or civil engineers, but parks and open spaces are clearly the specialty of landscape architects.
I and the PGAA team led by landscape architect Jerome Abad took several months to design the new spaces and the park. All such projects start with a detailed survey of the property, then a thorough evaluation of the functional needs of the park to be able to design its site properly. Parks are technically complex projects that require an understanding of pedestrian and vehicular circulation, civil engineering and bioengineering concepts, utility requirements such as drainage and lighting, security, as well as cultural use of space and human behavior. Planting design — involving trees, shrubs and ground covers — is only one, albeit important, component of a wide range of concerns in the design of parks and open spaces.
The Pasig Central Park was carved out of a hodgepodge of structures, alleys and parking lots that had accrued over the last thirty years behind the main Pasig City Hall building. The mayor had the area cleared, parking consolidated into a three-level facility, and functions in the cleared structures consolidated into the main perimeter buildings. A total of almost one hectare was recovered and re-purposed into a park and civic space for all Pasigueños to enjoy.
The new Pasig Central Park is composed of expansive green lawns, palms, shade trees with colorful perimeter shrubs and bamboos to screen off traffic and street views. The perimeter has a pedestrian loop, covered where it is needed and the whole network integrated with the existing overhead walkway system previously built by Mayor Eusebio. One side, where an access road was previously, was converted into a large multi-functional event space, roofed over by a modern tent-like membrane. Kiosks here provide city hall employees and visitors with snacks and meals.
For those with a caffeine craving, a new café called Café de Pasig was designed by UP-graduate and interior designer Catherine Jayco. The cool café has walls and ceiling painted with murals by UP Fine Arts artists. A granite-paved al fresco area by PGAA adjoins the café. Overhead, we turned the café’s roof into a green roof to lower the cooling requirements of the building and to provide a better view from the surrounding buildings.
I honestly do not know what the fuss is about all these new “green roofs,” when landscape architects like myself have been designing and building these landscaped roofs for the past 30 years! Having said this, it is not as easy as some designers will have you think. Many building architects and engineers who have attempted this without the collaboration of a landscape architect have ended up with dried or burned plants, scraggly shrubs and wind-blown desert-scapes instead of lush gardens.
The focal point of the new Pasig Central Park is a pond crossed by two bridges and embellished with waterfalls on one end, and fountain jets and a statue of the famous Mutya ng Pasig on the other. The Mutya ng Pasig is a local myth immortalized in the kundiman of the same name composed by Nicanor Abelardo and lyricist Deogracias A. Rosario in 1926. Their inspiration was the Pasig Carnival and its mutyas or town carnival queens. The song was popularized from then till today by famous singers like Atang dela Rama, Sylvia la Torre and Kuh Ledesma.
A movie of the same name was made by LVN in 1950. The melodrama starred Rebecca Gonzales as Mercedes, the character mutya who drowns in the river after being banished by her husband Dr. Modesto Millar, who accuses her of an illicit affair. Delia Razon plays Delia, the daughter, who was thought to have drowned too but was actually raised by a childless couple and eventually grew up as beautiful as her mother.
Delia also becomes a mutya and is betrothed to a handsome squire but misfortune falls as Delia falls into the Pasig one night. Her fiancé frantically searches for her and is drawn by a haunting song, which as legend had it, came from a sirena or mermaid that appeared after Mercedes’ death. The fiancé sees an apparition and realizes it is the ghost of Mercedes with Delia at her feet. Delia is brought to Dr. Millar who recognizes her because of a birthmark. The characters all find closure but the legend of the sirena lives on.
The test of the park came in September as it neared completion. Ondoy hit the area and the complex, along with extensive parts of Pasig City, was flooded, though not a bad as in Taytay, east of the Manggahan floodways. The cause of the floods were the larger problem of upland deforestation in Rizal and Bulacan provinces, and improper development upriver, along with the blocking of waterways whose easements were supposed to be under the jurisdiction of the DPWH and the DILG.
The Pasig Central Park, because it was now open and planted, served to help absorb some of the floodwaters. The park survived and was quickly repaired with only minor replacement of some plant material. In other countries, parks are designed with flood retention ponds. Other countries have extensive water gardens constructed with porous sub-strata and planted to specific plant types (most of which are found here in the Philippines) that can absorb flood waters.
The Pasig Central Park is the right step to help mitigate the seasonal problems of floods. Parks and open spaces are the right city components to reduce the debilitating effects of air and even noise pollution. Parks and open spaces also counter the excessive visual blight of urban areas and provide green, soothing relief, proven in tests to reduce stress among urbanites. Parks and opens spaces are a legacy to a sustainable future.
For the inauguration, I joined the mayor and his wife Maribel, and Vice Mayor Yoyong Martirez in cutting the ribbon. We also had coffee served by Café de Pasig’s concessionaire Nora Lacuna. The park’s contractor, Ezra Castillo, joined us in sipping to a great brew — the Pasig Central Park, which owes its success to a mayor with the foresight and the vision needed to clear enough space for the park, the city and all Pasigueños to breathe. Mayor Eusebio has finally broken out of the box this Christmas (that of overbuilding civic structures and recovering precious open space). Hopefully many more mayors do the same for their cities and their citizens.
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Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at Paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.
