Beloved hill station above the clouds

The holiday season from December to January with its cold winds and cooler temperatures never fails to remind me of a place some people used to refer to as Shangri-La. It was my hill station above the clouds where I grew up as a boy, enjoying some of the best years of life, including a few Christmases that can never again be relived because people who meant so much have long since passed away.

Tourist brochures refer to it as the “City of Pines,” or “Summer Capital of the Philippines.” I never thought of it in this light. It was simply home. In my youth, I would cross from one end of the city to another on foot without any difficulty. In fact, most of the time, it was actually lots of fun. Burnham Park meant roller skating, biking, boating, and even hunting for fighting spiders among the many bushes surrounding the lake in the center of the park. The gentle slopes all over the city provided us with the best venues for our homemade racing carts fashioned out of discarded carton boxes or galvanized sheets. The dried pines that covered the slopes made possible the great speeds at which our carts slid downhill, making for thrilling racing events.

In his fascinating book on American imperialism “How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States,” Daniel Immerwahr, an associate professor of history at Northwestern University, tells us how Baguio came about. Just as European colonizers set up hill stations all over Southeast Asia primarily as health centers and recreation areas, US colonial officials decided to carve out one of their own, choosing Baguio in the Cordilleras some 5,000 feet above sea level north of Manila.

It was William Cameron Forbes, governor-general from 1909 to 1913, who started the whole project, entrusting it to renowned Chicago architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham. Unlike many colonial administrators, Forbes enjoyed life in the Orient with its bountiful amenities and multiple servants. He also loved the people “though as nationalist leader Manuel Quezon observed, in the same way former slave owners loved their Negro slaves.” The enclave for the rich and famous in Makati City is named after him. For Burnham, it was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to build a city entirely from scratch. Actually he was commissioned to draw up master plans for Manila and Baguio, but it was the latter in which he was more deeply interested.

Before work could begin, a road to the hill station was needed. The story goes that when Governor-General William Howard Taft, who weighed close to 300 pounds, first visited Baguio during the early days of the American regime, he journeyed from Dagupan to the hill station on horseback, a distance of more than 50 miles. Upon reaching Baguio, Taft sent back word to Manila that he had arrived safely. Manila replied, saying “How is the horse?” Initially, a rail route was considered but being too costly, it was decided to build a wagon road instead. Major Lyman Kennon assembled a workforce of some 4,000 men from different countries and speaking diverse languages. In January 1905, after months of hard work, Kennon reported completion of the road. The Benguet road—renamed Kennon Road after its builder—was finished at a cost of close to $2 million and claimed the lives of hundreds of men through disease and accidents. But for Forbes, the road was worth it. “Baguio was paradise: Perpetual springtime, a cool mist, rolling hills, pine trees galore.”

The city itself was constructed in accordance with Burnham’s plans by his protégé, William Parsons. “It was a triumph of modern engineering, boasting of wide streets, an excellent sewer system, an ice plant, and later, hydroelectric power. It had large governmental buildings located on the slopes that surrounded the meadow so as to dominate everything in sight with commanding views.” The real center of life at least for the colonizers, was the Baguio Country Club featuring an 18-hole golf course “equal to the finest in Scotland.” Of the original 161 founding members, only six were Filipinos. In 1920, Baguio would be declared one of the finest hill stations in Asia, attracting thousands of tourists from all over the world. Six years ago, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines declared the city a heritage site.

Over the years, Baguio City gradually lost much of its earlier reputation and regard, primarily because of over-population that placed severe pressure on services and facilities, the accompanying pollution, the illegal destruction of forest areas, and the development of vacation resorts in other parts of the country. Nevertheless, the city remains my beloved hill station above the clouds.

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