By Joan Orendain
MAMA LOVED SOFTBALL. Sunday afternoons, whenever Papa was busy writing speeches for President Manuel Roxas (he was the Philippines’ first Press Secretary in 1946), Mama would drive us to Dewey Boulevard by the bay after lunch on Sunday. There, we would play catch (three girls and two boys — the third boy had not yet been born), eat popcorn, and watch the blazing sunset.
Then we would drive over to the Luneta to listen to Antonio Buenaventura’s Philippine Constabulary band play Sousa Marches and Philippine folk songs. Walter Loving had formed the band in 1902 and taken it to the 1904 St. Louis World Fair where during a blackout, he simply tied his handkerchief to his baton, and the band played on. (Jesus Cabarrus, briefly conscripted at the Manila Hotel, in 1945, witnessed Loving bayoneted to death by a Japanese soldier on the staircase leading to the second floor.)
As teenagers, my sister Jane and I together with Carmita Francisco, Josine Loinaz, Bibsy Carballo, Marica Aragon, and maybe two or three other young ladies, water-skied at Connie and Hank Pascal’s beach in Parañaque next to Jale Beach (Jale was notorious for naughty evening happenings.) The girls all had to wear two-piece bathing suits — a one-piece would have gotten waterlogged as we skied, causing one to sink.
On a sunny day when we were towing Bibsy on waterskis, we must have run over an armada of jellyfish which leapt up to Bibsy’s face to sting her. She screamed bloody murder. We loaded her into Rom Vildzius’s station wagon and rode to the Manila Doctor’s Hospital where we (five girls still in their two-piece bathing suits) were gawked at standing in the lobby in our almost naked state, with Bibsy crying loud enough to wake the dead.
All the beaches are now the Coastal Road.
Also sometime in the early 1960s, six of us — the brothers Dado and Pete Roa, Ben Cervantes (before he added the “h” to Ben), Lino Brocka, Jane, and I would listen to jazz at Pete Alfonso’s Café Indonesia on Dewey Boulevard. We ordered two beers, three to a beer, and nursed them for the next two or three hours. We then clambered up to the open upper deck of a Matorco bus flying the Boulevard route from end to end. By the time we approached Baclaran church, we all had to get off to pee. But where to pee? Dado said, “Simple. Let’s jump into Manila Bay.” The boys jumped in in their skivvies, and Jane and I jumped in in our dresses.
Dripping wet, we trudged onward to Ben’s yellow house in the Chinese Compound on Harrison St. (it is now Henry’s Hotel and in the same compound are the Avellana Art Gallery and Joji Lloren’s boutique where he designs high-fashion gowns). Ben and Lino scrambled all the eggs they could find in the cupboard, which at 3 a.m. tasted awfully good.
In 1990, long after Dewey had been renamed Roxas Boulevard, the engineering giant F.F. Cruz planned to reclaim Manila Bay. Toni Serrano Parsons, Bambi Harper, Doris Ho and other women demonstrated by the bay day after day.
Odette Alcantara, always brimming with far-out ideas, brought a rocking chair, wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, and sat on the rocking chair feigning old age infirmity.
Gabriel Besa was a toddler then; his mother Olga would push him in his stroller bearing the sign “Manila Bay is mine. Leave it alone.”
On one of those days, four green trucks parked along the Baywalk had begun to work on the reclamation project. The drivers had taken off on their lunch break, giving creative boys from a nearby Catholic high school the chance to purloin the keys and pitch them into the bay.
In the end, Cruz gave up in 1992.
However, sometime in the same year, Ping De Jesus, public works secretary, threatened to practically take away the Baywalk to widen the boulevard. He listened to our objection, and gamely walked with Doris and this writer to take away here a meter, there a half meter, all jotted down in a notebook. The Secretary was as good as his word — the Baywalk stayed.
But again, in 2010 or 2011, another proponent threatened to start a reclamation project in Manila Bay. Anti-reclamation folk organized a huge demonstration at Plaza Rajah Sulayman and along the bay. Paolo Alcazaren commissioned a drone to photograph the demonstration from the air, and the famous artist Betsy Westendorp carried her easel to the Baywalk and began painting.
Betsy had long been enamored of Manila Bay. She had moved into the Excelsior Building on Roxas Boulevard in 1982, painting fiery sunsets, houses on stilts over the water just across from her penthouse apartment, and now and again would take boat rides with her daughters, Isabel, Sylvia, and Carmen among the barong-barongs on stilts. She had long been widowed by then. She had been married to Antonio Brias, a vice-president at San Miguel, when they lived in their Forbes Park home. There, she had an atelier where she painted portraits, before moving on to other subjects.
A famous Spanish writer, Elena Flores, called her paintings of blazing sunsets, dark skies, and ominous clouds, “Atmosferografias.” In these, she said, “The firmament turns into a scenario of insurmountable beauty. Here, creation has given to art its most gorgeous miracle of aesthetic spontaneity.”
No one could have felt more robbed of Manila Bay then when it was reclaimed. Doña Conchita Ortol, when taken for a paseo on the boulevard in 2014 at age 101, was happy to recognize the San Juan De Dios Hospital on her right-hand side. A cry of alarm rose from her when she turned to her left.
“What happened to the bay? What are all those ugly buildings doing there?”
House of Representative Deputy Speaker Rosemarie Arenas recently filed House Bill 3169: “An Act Declaring Manila Bay a Heritage Asset Free From Any and All Forms of Further Reclamation and Providing Penalties Therefor.”
At an Oceana symposium sponsored by the Bloomberg Foundation and the Manila Yacht Club held on Sept. 17, Ms. Arenas was the guest speaker. She, together with a UP scientist, Mike Lu of the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines, a representative of the Philippine Ports Authority, gave presentations. Also present were the attorney Armi Corpus representing Senator Cynthia Villar who is striving to protect the Las Piñas-Parañaque Critical Habitat and Ecotourism Area, and members of Save Our Shores (SOS); Emily Abrera, ex-officio Chairperson of the Cultural Center of the Philippines; representing the Sofitel Hotel, Esteban Peña-Sy; and this writer as SOS Convenor among other presenters, offered reasons why the Manila Bay should not be reclaimed.
Dr. Kelvin Rodolfo, Professor Emeritus of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois, had previously presented the strongest scientific reasons why “reclaiming Manila Bay is a very bad idea”
• Subsidence: from so much groundwater being extracted by the city’s dwellers, Manila has sunk two to four inches in recent years and threatens to sink at an even more rapid rate as the population increases.
• Storm surges: Manileños certainly remember Super Typhoon Pedring, a Category 4 typhoon that inundated the US Embassy, flooding it for a week. Floodwater also totally ruined the ground floor of the Sofitel Hotel, which cost over a hundred million pesos in repairs which took over a year to do. Other establishments along the boulevard were similarly affected.
• Liquefaction: during the minute that an earthquake lasts, it violently shakes the sediments and the water that soaks it, mixing them together into a slurry, causing structures above it to sink into it or to tilt or even fall over. Graphic examples are the collapse of the six-storey Ruby Tower in Binondo on Aug. 2, 1968, causing 268 deaths; and the 1990 earthquake in Nueva Ecija that liquefied the ground beneath of Dagupan City 100 kilometers away, causing great damage to many buildings.
Apart from these hazards brought about by reclamation, there will be urban problems to contend with: water shortages, power shortages, and traffic even more horrendous than at present. The Philippine Ports Authority also faces the problem of where to relocate the South Harbor (ocean-going vessels), and the North Harbor (inter-island ships).
Reclamation will also destroy the habitats of dozens of varieties of fish, shrimp, shellfish, and crabs that spawn in and abound in Manila Bay.
Thousands of hectares of nearshore Manila Bay from all along Bulacan through the city of Manila, Parañaque, Las Piñas, Bacoor, and Sangley Point in Cavite are all proposed for reclamation.
Shame on money-grubbing corporations, and shame on the Philippine Reclamation Authority. Wasn’t PRA, once PEA-Amari, notorious for being “The mother of all scams”?
