March 3, 2000, The Philippine Star, Lost Cubao - Why And Why Not, by Nelson A. Navarro,

March 3, 2000, The Philippine Star, Lost Cubao - Why And Why Not, by Nelson A. Navarro,

At a recent reunion of First Quarter Storm veterans, the subject of Cubao came
out of the blue and everybody swooned. Not for the polluted urban hellhole we
now avoid like the plague, but for the part/genteel, part provincial watering
hole that it was from the mid to the late 1960s.

Yes, Virginia, Cubao had a brief shining moment once upon a time. After Quiapo
and before Makati and Ortigas, it was the crossroads of Manila absent the
uppity metro or capital region ek-ek of the 1980s and 90s.

The 1950s belonged to Quiapo as the 1940s and the charmed decades before that
pertained to Escolta, Binondo and Sta. Cruz. But by the 1960s, Downtown Manila
was in rapid decline and the exodus was eastwards to Quezon City, then largely
howling grasslands and scattered settlements aching to fulfill its destiny as
Manuel Quezon's trying-hard answer to Paris.

Beyond U.P. Diliman, where my friends and I studied in splendid isolation just
15-minutes away on the jeep from Cubao, there was nothing but howling
wilderness. On one ROTC bivouac, someone in our nostalgic group noted, they
hiked across vast cogonal stretches to get to La Mesa Dam. They had no inkling
at all that wasteland would yield forever to the ticky-tacky homes of
"Fairview" and to slums galore, including Payatas.

Although Quiapo kept up pretenses of old glory until the martial law years when
Makati sort of seized the thunder, Cubao in the early 1970s was well-entrenched
as the darling of the smart set. It was where Highway 54 met with Aurora
Boulevard--before the former metamorphosed into flyover-crazy Edsa and the
later lost its romantic aura as a road that was specifically built by the
government so Doña Aurora Quezon could easily drive from Malacanang to
her country estate in Barranca, just before Katipunan Road.

Cubao was, of course, to the Amading Araneta empire as Makati was to become the
bottomless gold mine of Joseph and Mercedes McMicking and Ortigas Center of the
Ortigas clan in the then-distant 1980s.

Then as now, Araneta Center was lorded over by the eponymously named coliseum
which was touted as "the world's largest." As we are well aware, all three
mammoth centers were to follow the same disgraceful path from visionary modern
development to unfettered commercial greed. But that's one moral lesson we must
reserve for another time.

At the height of its glory, Cubao stood heads and shoulders over hopelessly
congested Quiapo. It was the mecca of the emerging suburban crowd. Quezon City
was not yet a vast squatter's paradise and even the promdis from
Marikina behaved themselves. The names of the nearby streets reeked of foreign
magic: Boston, Minnesota, Cambridge, New York, etc.

Don Amading's idea was very California--to put together a huge entertainment
complex with nice shops, good restaurants and lots of parking and open spaces.
Public transportation was excellent. Garbage and vagrants were out of sight and
out of mind. It was as close to Anaheim as the country would ever get. And for
a few years, just as wholesome and family-oriented.

Apart from the coliseum which showed everything from Holiday on Ice to
circuses, beauty pageants and famous imported pop singers (Matt Munro, Timi
Yuro, Jerry Vale, etc), there were two first-run moviehouses, New Frontier and
Nation, which were Cubao's proud bets against the old cinema palaces along
Avenida Rizal.

The low-density shopping arcade which stretched along Aurora Boulevard had
everything from the Philippine National Bank to Lilia Dizon's Bathaluman Beauty
Parlor to Chinese restaurants like a Ma Mon Luk and Hong Ning to perhaps the
first suburban branch of Mercury Drug chain.

Just about the only touch of class was Aguinaldo's Department Store, complete
with a lily pond up front. Other shopping options were the COD, soon to be
famous for its Christmas razzmatazz, and the Matsuzakaya store, a rather skimpy
imitation of the Japanese original.

Across the boulevard was Stella Maris, Cubao's version of an exclusive girls'
school which invariably attracted the daughters of the military in nearby Camp
Murphy (now Aguinaldo). This was before the college, like U.E. in Downtown
Manila, lost its impressive front lawn to some ugly mall.

Fine dining was unheard of. But there were at least two nice restaurants. The
first one was Eugene's, which hosted many debutante balls of the
Kamuning-Kamias gentry and of those Projects (2,3,4) in the direction of
Marikina. The other was Aristocrat's where starving Dilimanites and other
nightowls could go in the wee hours for excellent and cheap
sate-babi.

Arguably the "in" place was the A&W Drive-In of the Gutherz family where
hamburgers cost a mint and the rootbeer was, well, forgettable. Somewhere in
the edges, there was a seedy nightclub, Tender Trap, a popular bibingka parlor
called Aling Nena's, and, of course, Hyacinth, hidden in a private house on
quiet New York Street, where smuggled stateside goods sold like hot cakes to
wannabe folks who knew where their priorities lay.

Cubao was awash in willful innocence and so were we.