The Heritage Conservation Society

By Paulo Alcazaren
The Philippine STAR 08/05/2006                   

In the 1970s, I started my professional career working in the Central
Business District of Makati. The commute was five minutes from Baryo
Kapitolyo in Pasig where I lived and traffic was never heavy except
across the then-narrow bridge of pre-billboarded Guadalupe. Although
the office I worked in was on Paseo de Roxas, what struck me as odd
were the names of the two major office districts that flanked Ayala
Avenue.

Legazpi Village and Salcedo Village housed dozens of
pint-sized office buildings that rose up from their curved streets.
They were half the height of the Ayala buildings, which were uniform at
about 12 stories high (the limit in the ‘60s was about 15 stories
because of fear of earthquakes – building technology has since
progressed – and the proximity to the airport). I figured that maybe
the areas were called villages because of their small-scaled structures
and smallish network of roads.

I was wrong, of course.

The answer lay in the very success of Ayala’s Makati. But the
clues were in that network of streets, the fact that both areas had
central open spaces and the fact that surrounding these two were
several already established residential villages – San Lorenzo,
Urdaneta, and Bel-Air.

Salcedo and Legazpi Villages were actually designed and laid
out as residential villages to support the central spine of Ayala
Avenue, which was the only area originally meant to house multi-story
office buildings. The two were to be the last in a sequence of
"subdivided" housing (or "homesite," to use the term then prevalent)
developments that complimented the live-work-play new suburb of Makati.

The background story is one of Ayala’s Makati and the strategy
that the original planners led by Don Alfonso Zobel, Don Enrique Zobel,
Colonel McMicking and Col. Jaime Velasquez took to develop the 1,650
hectares of former Jesuit-held swamp and marginal agricultural land.

They had taken the tack to develop a complete new satellite
city with industry, offices and housing all connected via well-paved,
well-lit, quick-draining roads. Few today remember that Makati in the
‘50s and early ‘60s was the most industrialized town in the province of
Rizal (Makati was still a municipality and Metropolitan Manila as an
entity was still decades away so any place not a city was under the
control of the provincial government). The developers knew that people
would move to Makati if work was nearby in factories, if the
administrative offices of these plants were a few hundred meters away
and if housing was a short hop away in your Dodge, Chevy or Chrysler.

Makati offered an alternative to war-damaged Manila and did so
ahead of the government’s own plans for Quezon City (which I’ve written
about several times in this column). Since the National Capital Plan
was forever short of funds to consolidate land, much less put in
infrastructure, anyone with a viable alternative was able to meet the
demands of the post-war market. Makati offered all this plus it was
only four kilometers from the old center compared to 15 from Quezon
City.

Sales of housing sites, office and factory plots boomed. The
Ayala Avenue strip was soon filled and by the early ‘70s the demand was
so great that the last two residential clusters, Legazpi and Salcedo
Villages, were turned into commercial zones and opened up for small
office buildings. Of course, the drainage and power infrastructure was
designed for residences so it took a while to retrofit the utilities.
Traffic was also a problem eventually as no one had expected such huge
volumes of cars and people. Ayala took another two decades to fix the
problem with overhead pedestrian bridges to encourage walking and
parking garages to increase capacities. In addition to all these
factors was the development of Alabang and alternatives for housing
even farther away.

Today, Makati is filling out and density is increasing. The
office villages are booming in a second wave that is seeing structures
as tall as their Ayala Avenue cousins. The call center phenomenon and
new lifestyles are also turning the two into real villages where people
actually live-work-play. Ayala Land has started to build high-rise
condominiums in, or close to, these villages like the Columns and
Columns 2 to bring back the original intent full circle – village life
has never been more urban and, from the looks of plans, more urbane.

Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 1:32 am and is filed under City Sense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.