Cubao’s brief shining moment

Before Makati, there was Cubao. Before Cubao, there was Quiapo.

I am talking of what passed for the heart of business and the virtual center of civilized Filipino life before the historic city of Manila morphed into today’s crazy-quilt Metro Manila and the crown of progress moved, perhaps irreversibly, to Makati and points south like Fort Bonifacio, Mall of Asia and Alabang.

Until the late 1950s, all Philippine roads led to the bustling district of Quiapo on the north side of the Pasig River. This waterway of our tormented history separated the Walled City of Intramuros, for centuries the seat of government, from commercial life that was disdainfully relegated to the northern bank. Under the Spaniards and the Americans, economic power was vested in the ancient Chinese quarter of Binondo, capped by the elegant Escolta Street and adjacent to the drowsy residential district of Quiapo.

Quiapo was the logical and most accessible expansion area that, in fact, consolidated Binondo’s rule as post-World War II urban growth began to spill eastward to what would become Quezon City.

The shift farther inland and away from the Pasig River had been ordained from 1937 when President Manuel Quezon created Quezon City; his loyal followers later proclaimed the city they named in his honor the national capital in lieu of Manila. At the height of martial law, President Marcos formally restored Manila’s primary status, but its old and accustomed power and glory were long gone. 

What was amiss for a long time was that Quezon City was a capital only in name. As late as 1959, it was largely barren territory, a veritable no man’s land too, recently hounded by Huk rebels and earmarked for mass housing in the style of America’s Levittowns and ersatz suburban communities.

The sudden appearance of the Araneta Coliseum in the next year, 1960, would signal Quezon City’s bid to draw the epicenter of commerce into its otherwise unpromising direction. The brainchild of J. Amado Araneta, a flamboyant Negros sugar baron with deep political connections, the coliseum would become a landmark in every sense of the word. Its sheer size (“the world’s largest”) and the founder’s showman instincts would turn the place and its immediate environs in Cubao into an entertainment and shopping mecca that in due time eclipsed Quiapo. But Cubao, in turn, would be divested of its central role and importance by Makati, the upcoming giant development of the Ayalas some 15 kilometers to the south.   

For all that, the Sixties belonged to Don Amading Araneta, who dressed all in white down to the shoes but without socks long before Kokoy Romualdez stole his act. Araneta Center became a commercial gold mine that antedated and set the stage for the more dazzling feats not only of the Ayalas, but of Henry Sy, John Gokongwei, Lucio Tan and Andrew Tan. These taipans would push the country into the next gilded age of shopping malls, real estate frenzy, and high finance.

Simple geography favored Araneta Center. It sat on a vital crossroad where once-forlorn Highway 54 (later Edsa) intersected with equally forlorn Aurora Boulevard. The 35-hectare property on which the coliseum was built was contiguous to two major military camps, Murphy (later Aguinaldo) and Crame. Don Amading purchased it in 1952, sensing its strategic value as an alternative commercial center outside Manila.

The location couldn’t have been more auspicious. Laid out as a half-moon transportation arc around Manila, the Caloocan-to-Pasay artery was intended to connect the north and south sides of the Pasig without traffic having to go through the already-congested city center.

On the other hand, the bisecting west-to-east Aurora Boulevard, named after Quezon’s wife, linked the city from Manila Bay to the vast and undeveloped Marikina Valley. Its parallel roads like Quezon Boulevard, Ortigas Avenue and Shaw Boulevard would later help accelerate growth out of Manila. 

Government middle- and low-cost housing projects were fast going up north and east of Cubao. Next door in the military camps, the generals and soldiers were on a frantic house-building spree.

Although Don Amading was ahead of the pack, he was aware of the serious challenge posed by the sprawling but unproductive Zobel-Ayala hacienda in Makati which was also being developed for commercial and residential purposes by Joseph McMicking, the founding genius behind the future Ayala conglomerate.  

Cubao’s short-lived reign as the country’s new business mecca, roughly from 1966 to 1975, would be gradually undermined and defeated by McMicking’s grandiose undertaking not too far away.

Politics would influence the unfolding competition. As if by design, the Ayalas were in the periphery; the Aranetas were passionately involved. The former saw themselves as Spaniards, in fact some holding dual citizenships, and never bothered to run as candidates in any election. This disengagement enabled them to survive and flourish under each and every administration, notably the Marcos dictatorship.

Don Amading Araneta, long-time treasurer and financier of the Liberal Party, had the upper hand as the top crony of the short-lived Roxas administration right after the war when he practically controlled the sugar trade, the main pillar of the Philippine economy.

President Manuel Roxas had ordered the consolidation of the ruined Negros centrals and awarded the bulk of the centrals to the Araneta group. The subsequent marriage of Roxas’ only son to one of Araneta’s two daughters would further cement the political-economic partnership that was at the heart of the extended family’s Cubao venture.

When President Marcos seized power in 1972, the Aranetas lived as semi-exiles in New York, the empire they left behind was run by remote control and slowly crumbled to pieces. Today, Secretary Mar Araneta Roxas carries the Roxas-Araneta torch and leads the clan’s unrelenting drive, unsuccessful so far, to reclaim the nation’s presidency.

The Ayala group, into which McMicking had married, was largely into banking and insurance and was conveniently in the shadow of a close relative, Don Andres Soriano, business associate of General Douglas MacArthur, liberator of the Philippines. Soriano controlled the nation’s largest firm, San Miguel (later taken over by Danding Cojuangco) plus extensive mining and manufacturing interests and the airline monopoly.

But the immediate post-war battle over the question of where business would move from Quiapo-Binondo was to be a spirited contest between the Aranetas and the Ayalas. The latter’s success would provide the immense capital base, financial liquidity and momentum to enable Ayala Corporation to beat the Aranetas as well as the Sorianos, Madrigals, Elizaldes and other Quezon era moguls.

Only the Lopezes of the electric monopoly and media empire bested the Ayalas by the early 1970s.The former was dealt a death blow by the dictatorship, only to be dramatically resurrected under the Aquino and Ramos regimes.

The high-flying Ayalas and restored Lopezes would be, in turn, supplanted by the ascendant taipans beginning in the martial law period and culminating in 2010 when the latter as a group all but reduced the old-time Spaniards and Filipinos to secondary status.

A new crop of empire-builders would emerge at the start of the 21st century to complicate the picture: Manuel Pangilinan, backed by big Indonesian money; Ramon Ang, Danding Cojuangco’s designated successor at San Miguel; and Roberto Ongpin, former Marcos financial whiz kid. 

But back to the pivotal Araneta-Ayala fight of the 1960s. What was involved was the all-important matter of space, raw physical space, plus the classical real estate imperatives of location, location and location.

The Ayalas had about 1,000 hectares of contiguous land compared to a mere 35 hectares that the Araneta group could carve out of former government and military land in their wilder side of town. Although both centers would be ringed by squatter colonies and urban eyesores, the former had more elbow room and opportunities for wealth-creation and good living amid third world squalor. Cubao would be slowly but surely strangulated by the fatal combination of traffic gridlock and human riff-raff before it could realize its full potential.

More important was the political peace and stability that was required to avoid the tragic fate of Quiapo and Binondo. The Ayalas early on struck a feudal concordat with wily Makati politicians who kept the poor side of town out of sight of the American-style business enclave and gated upper-class subdivisions they were building to draw the top corporations away from the Escolta, and the rich and famous families from the well-heeled quarters of Ermita, Malate, New Manila and Pasay.

From Jose Villena to Max Estrella to Nemesio Yabut formed a reliable line of Makati mayors who caused little trouble and guaranteed a long period of peace and prosperity for the Ayalas. In 1986, following the Edsa revolt, Jejomar Binay came to power; his dynasty would last for the next 20 years, largely because he and the Ayalas managed to come to terms about turning Makati into the clear alternative to Quiapo and the just-risen but highly vulnerable Cubao empire of the Aranetas.

But while it lasted, Cubao’s heyday was glorious and heady, if not all too brief and patchy. For one thing, the Aranetas hardly controlled the Amoranto machine that ruled Quezon City with an iron fist well into the martial law years. Succeeding  overlords like the Rodriguezes, Simons, Mathays and Belmontes would turn out as impervious to Cubao’s pious wishes, much less dictation.

Makati’s territory was too small to absorb the growing armies of the poor, economic refugees from the provinces, who found more hospitable ground in Quezon City. With its huge and largely empty land area equivalent to a small province, the latter would displace Manila as the squatter capital of the Philippines. It comes as no surprise that by 2010, Makati’s 500,000 population would be dwarfed by its rival’s some three million residents, mostly poor or low-income.

Makati would come out the nation’s richest city per capita and always envied for its 21st century infrastructure and social services. It would also serve as a powerful base for Jejomar Binay, now the nation’s Vice President. (A little footnote: Binay unexpectedly beat Mar Roxas for the number two slot in 2010; the two could have a rematch for the presidency in 2016 — another case, some observers say, of Cubao and Makati being engaged in another epic battle, but this time with far greater consequences.)   

Planned development enabled Makati’s triumph at the expense of freewheeling Cubao, which sat in the middle of helter-skelter urban sprawl that could only put a low ceiling to its commercial value. Ayala Center seized the initiative by limiting growth to its specifications and keeping riff-raff off its territory. Shrewd forward planning led the group to buy into Alabang and Fort Bonifacio, thus preempting would-be competitors in the future.

The Cubao Period, if we have to call it that, begins and ends with the coliseum that first put it on the map. Since March 1960, it has been the venue of choice for boxing championship fights, basketball and cockfighting tournaments, beauty pageants ad nauseam, musical shows featuring foreign artists, and political conventions.

Don Amading’s populist thrust always sharply contrasted with the Ayalas’ unabashed pandering to the upwardly mobile and elite crowd. Low coliseum admission prices (one peso for a decade or so) kept lower and middle class crowds flocking to Cubao.  

As a UP student of the mid-Sixties, I was a silent witness to the rise of Cubao and the unfolding of its glory days. I was never into boxing or Miss Universe. My pleasant memories hark back to Holiday on Ice and a good number of concerts of foreign artists like Matt Monro, Neil Sedaka, Jack Jones and the Everly Brothers.

When my batch first arrived in Diliman, the smart set, to which we students believed we belonged, gravitated to Quiapo like our parents and grandparents always did. There was no other place to go to see first-run movies, eat good food, window-shop, and make you feel you were part of the modern world. Cubao was hardly in the picture unless you liked boxing and Flash Elorde, which was what Araneta Coliseum was best known for in its early days.

Looking back, the tide gradually shifted to Cubao around 1966, simply because it was right in the heart of Quezon City, a shorter 10-centavo ride away (compared with 25 centavos to Quiapo), and it offered more and more of what attracted people to Quiapo. New Frontier Cinema begun to show first-run films, followed by Nation Cinerama and Quezon, all comparable to the movie palaces along Rizal Avenue. Cubao’s restaurant scene boasted of Aristocrat and Eugene’s on the Edsa side. Along Aurora Boulevard, there was a good Chinese restaurant, Hong Ning, and a branch of Ma Mon Luk of Quiapo dispensing its iconic siopao and mami.

The star attraction for the young Americanized crowd was A&W, a drive-in restaurant where Farmers Mall is now located. It gave us teenagers a vicarious taste of California life that would later be celebrated in the Hollywood film American Graffiti. We loved hamburgers and root beer. The waitresses wheeled around in roller skates. You could be served at curbside in your car.

Around New Frontier Cinema were two or three smart cafés (one was named Cup and Saucer, the other was Chocolate House) where young professionals and students congregated in the pre-Starbucks era. After watching a late-night James Bond film or whatever was playing in the Coliseum, this was the place to hang out. Or you walked over to Aling Nena’s Bibingka beside Stella Maris College. Beyond A&W, going south, there were all-night restaurants like Kobe Chicken.

The Cubao area was definitely wholesome and fancier than the raunchy beer parlors and dives on Rizal Avenue like Luisa & Sons. Makati was mainly corporate country and a lonely outpost for merry-making until the Intercontinental Hotel and Rizal Theatre were built around 1968.

Cubao shopping approached Escolta standards when Aguinaldo’s opened its branch near the Coliseum. This upscale department store antedated Rustan’s, which was then marooned in San Marcelino Street at the edges of Paco, Manila. The high rollers and their pretty daughters were on parade in Aguinaldo’s lovely shop, which was favorably set off by a lily pond.

Behind New Frontier, right beside Nation Cinerama was Matzusakaya, which sold Japanese goods. A block or two away would rise Manila COD Department Store, which came to be known for its dazzling Christmas lights and decorations. A whole generation of kids grew up watching these displays the way people now cruise along Ayala Avenue to see the holiday lights.

Before bank branches proliferated like mushrooms, Philippine National Bank opened its Cubao branch to save you the trouble of going all the way to its headquarters on the Escolta. Other banks followed. Aside from faraway Cash-and-Carry and Cartimar, smuggled luxury goods from Hong Kong could be bought at Hyacinth, housed in a discreet bungalow on New York Street, just a short walk towards City Hall, which was then in front of Nepa-Q Market.

By the time I got exiled in 1971, Cubao was on the skids and Makati was catching up fast. I am glad I wasn’t around for the former’s sad decline and humiliation. When I came back for good in 1988, its downfall was a done deal and I could only grieve for the old haunts of my college days.

Cubao’s magic began to wear off, I think, when its populist and clean middle-class orientation was subverted by the sex trade that took root just outside Araneta Center and beyond the latter’s control. The low-life and lumpen proletariat that came in its wake blighted the place as well as once-respectable neighborhoods all the way to Camp Murphy.  

This illicit business was a middle-class macho convenience that turned into a social cancer epitomized by the notorious “Bakal Boys” of the 1980s and the drug dealers they brought along, which gave Araneta Center an undeserved bad name.

It all started with kinky pleasures moving closer to bedroom communities. You didn’t have to go all the way to Pasay. Across A&W on the other side of Edsa was the Tender Trap, a cabaret just a shade less grungy than the vulgar flesh spots of Barrio Calumpang, Marikina, much farther away. Tender Trap, I am told, presaged the proliferation of sleazy beer houses like Alibangbang and Salagubang.

Massage parlors, saunas, prostitution dens, and sex-oriented movie houses would take over the other side of Aurora Boulevard and compel Stella Maris to give up its huge and beautiful lawn so it could hide in shame behind shabby commercial structures that, of course, earned the Franciscan nuns more money.

What’s been done to save Araneta Center and Cubao from disaster? In fairness, there have been brave, if intermittent, efforts to breathe new life into Araneta Center. What stands out is the building some five years ago of the modernistic and well-admired Gateway Mall. A bit too late and too little investment, some critics say, compared to Ayala’s obsessive multimillion-peso drive not to be upstaged by the high-powered competition of the Sys and Gokongweis.

But some effort of redemption is preferable to full surrender to the cruel jungle that cannot stop strangulating Don Amading Araneta’s proud creation and legacy.

For unimpressed observers, Cubao sticks out as a noisy and polluted transportation hub pockmarked with high-rise developments in apparent denial of the ugly state of perdition all around the area. What I hear is that even Araneta Center’s franchise as the Manila home of Miss Universe and other glitzy exercises in irrelevance may not be enough to save a sinking ship. Having known Cubao in its glorious prime, I can only hope that the naysayers may have spoken too soon.

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E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com