Lost Cubao - Why And Why Not

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.