President Quezon’s dream city: Lost ‘showplace’ of the nation

My family lives in an un-gated and unguarded mini-residential subdivision along Mindanao Avenue in Barangay Bahay Toro, Quezon City. Originally from Cabanatuan City, my wife and I, both public school teachers, migrated to Quezon City in 1971 in search of the proverbial greener pasture. At the time, our place was very peaceful and orderly; it was then a vast grassy savannah where carabaos, cows, goats and other grass-eating animals loved to graze and loiter.

Not anymore. Today our place is no longer as peaceful and orderly as before. Gone is the bucolic savannah where I used to jog every morning. In its place is a rumbling, noisy asphalt jungle named Mindanao Avenue. Ironically, like the horrendous traffic gridlock bedeviling motorists on Edsa, the unwelcome development in our place was brought about by “unbridled population growth and progress,” as an observer puts it.

The front of our house has practically transmogrified into a “terminal” for tricycles, many of which have exhaust pipes that belch out toxic smoke and make ear-splitting, roaring sounds. The place now also hosts an overpopulated informal settlement that blares out on-and-off nuisance music, er, noise. Unruly children, and idle teenagers sometimes engage in a rumble with outsiders, including stray dogs from the cramped settlement, thus disturbing the tranquility of our place and defiling the environment.

Worse, at the back of our house hemmed in by other houses, is an abandoned, illegally constructed, unfinished 10-story hospital building. As far as I can remember, the construction of the building began in 2011. Because of the continuing cloud of dust from gravel and sand and other debris that damaged our houses, the affected residents filed a complaint against the building owner, the contractor and certain officials of the concerned City Hall department. On Sept. 18, 2013, came the long-delayed cease and desist order stopping the construction. I wonder why it took two years for the building official concerned to issue the order. Had the order been issued earlier or, better still, at the start of the construction, the damage to our homes could have been avoided and so with our fear engendered by the presence of that monster building in our surroundings.

Lately, we learned that a criminal complaint was filed in court by the building official against the hospital building owner and contractor for violation of the National Building Code and the Quezon City zoning ordinance.

These problems confronting our community may be the same problems being experienced by other communities located nearby or in-between a super highway and an informal settlement. It behooves the Quezon City’s incoming and succeeding administrations to attend to and address the problems and concerns of these and other similarly situated communities and give them back the peaceful and orderly environment, thereby making them wholesome and more livable. Then and only then, can we give meaning and credence to the following words of the late President Manuel L. Quezon, words inscribed on a pillar of the Quezon City Hall:

“I dream of a capital city that politically shall be the seat of the national government; aesthetically, the showplace of the nation.”

—PRUDENCIO E. MAGPAYO, 47 Ofelia Village Project 8, QC