A daily walk through Manila's forgotten past, with Paulo Alcazaren

Every morning, Philippine Star columnist and BluPrint editor-in-chief Paulo Alcazaren sits down in front of his computer to deliver his morning guessing game: ‘MMM’ or Metro Manila Memories. Averaging about thirty likes for every post, MMM is a daily Facebook quiz that draws from old photographs that, in turn, draw from minds not so quick to forget. 

 

“The format of Facebook moulded the posts, and for effect limited the image to a singular picture that would 'hook' the reader,” Alcazaren reveals. 

 

“Paul Newman,” three people immediately comment. I wouldn’t have guessed it. Participants then help Alcazaren throw in all the sideline trivia that could possibly aid collective memory, to the point that even the Bayanihan dancer’s identity is revealed to be a certain Ms. Atega—a name that even Google hadn’t been able to help me find.

 

“I made the quiz to make people remember how the metropolis has changed,” Alcazaren explains. “Also to make people think about how the metropolis could be changed to make it better.”

 

Alcazaren was born in Argao, Cebu, and moved to Quezon City before his second birthday. Between the day he was born and now, being recognized as one of the Philippines’ most renowned landscape architects, there was something simpler: his childhood. Alcazaren recalls his trips to the city center, visiting his lolo on Avenida, Rizal, watching movies in theaters probably long gone, going to Divisoria and Central markets, and strolling around Luneta.

 

Aside from turning into a landscape architect, Alcazaren has grown up to be quite a history buff. He has been running his column ‘City Sense’ in the Philippine Star  for over ten years, which in turn gives him a ready pool of research to plug into MMM.“ I always wondered why Manila and QC were the way they were,” Alcazaren thinks back. “And why later the place to go was Makati and Cubao…each with a different flavor connected by several wide but poorly maintained highways.”

 

“The rest of Metro Manila is gray in most Facebook friends' memories ...except for a lot of balikbayans who have memories of 50s and 60s Manila.” A few of Alcazaren’s friends are already in their seventies. With Google having trouble helping us find an answer, these older firsthand witnesses have it easiest. “Pre-war Manila is interesting to many, but few (save some architectural scholars and art historians) can accurately identify these older pictures.”

 

In terms of crowd pleasers, however, Alcazaren admits that it’s Makati. It’s hard for some to imagine now, but some fifty years ago, Makati was mostly grassland with a few buildings too dull to poke the sky. In spite of that, most of his friends have memories of experiences in places like Makati Commercial Center. “Modern Makati of the ‘60s and ‘70s was well documented, so I am able to access many images compared to the rest of the metropolis.”

 

If you go back through Alcazaren’s wall a little, you’ll find a young architect leaning out a balcony looking out to a quiet view that is now the very busy Ayala Avenue. It was easy for a lot of the architects to figure it out: Leandro Locsin. But what caused some light contention between them was in which building the photograph was taken—something your average person wouldn’t really bother to find out. But soon they welcomed Locsin’s son with his kind words and found themselves brought together by Locsin’s memory. It’s this sense of community that arises in Alcazaren’s quiz that makes it special; something that Facebook can so easily lose for us otherwise.

 

For most of us, Metro Manila Memories is not an easy game—unless you can exchange your youth for time travel, to a time when GMA was just an awkward teenager representing her father in New York or when Flash Elorde was the boxer of the day. Alcazaren sums up the quiz with a quote he rightly paraphrases: “An un-examined city ...is not worth living in.’” — TJD/KG, GMA News