The district of Malate-Ermita two boroughs adjacent to the walled city of Intramuros Manila was where I spent a good part of my youth in during the late 70s to late 90s. The fortunes of these twin neighborhoods would take different trajectories. Malate became sort of a hipster place to live in for a time, while Ermita retained a lot of quaint and interesting places that slipped beneath the radar of the trendy-set.
Having moved out of Malate with my parents in 1993, I moved shortly back in 1995 and made my residence at the colonial era Michelle Apartments (pictured above) on Apolinario Mabini Street, just down the road from the Remedios Circle and J. Nakpil where all the interesting cafés and night jaunts like Penguin, Third World and Blue Café were.
I wrote and performed a lot of my best poetry in these places. They were hangouts for artists, intellectuals, activists, NGO workers, and yes, the avante-garde gay community. That is before it succumbed to gentrification and commercialization.
Malate became a victim of its own success. Today it is a wasteland, a shell of its former self. Most of these places I mentioned closed down either before or during the early noughties when more pretentious and wannabe places took over the scene.
Very few at the time thought about Ermita the neighboring borough which during the 80s became a notorious red-light district. However, just as New York had its Rudolph Guiliani, Manila had its Alfredo Lim, who cleaned up the district following the closure of the US bases in Subic and Clark in 1992. The shops that benefited from this shady form of tourism suffered for awhile. So during those days Malate's star was rising just as Ermita was on the decline.
Unbeknownst to many, however, Ermita is home to a lot of interesting places that went unnoticed to many in the hipster crowd at the time. Many of these places I frequented in those days. Today, I returned to my former stomping ground.
A lot of changes have occurred. The great mallification of Manila has seen high rise condos and gleaming hotels sprouting left and right. Many former landmarks have been torn-down replaced by new ones I am not familiar with. But despite all this a few surviving remnants of the old town remain.
As I recount my walking tour of the place I used to call home, I realize that I might be turning into one of those old fogies I used to make fun of who used to recount the way Manila used to be back in its "heyday". What I am grateful for is the fact that while a lot has changed, some of the old places still linger.
It is true. When a person returns to his former home, it is not so much the new developments that interest him however convenient or progressive they might be. It is the old and familiar places that remind him of old times and faces that he or she looks forward to seeing.
Thank you for your post. Since the 1930s up to recently, my friend's family owned the Michelle Apartments and its "twin" behind it. He lived in the penthouse unit on the 9th floor with his grandfather and during the 80s we spent many nights hanging out in the small corner terrace. We even got to go to the highest points of the building which surprisingly were a couple of floors above the penthouse, via the rear, open air staircase and some ladders. I really miss that place, even when we had to use the stairwell whenever the tiny, gated elevator wasn't working. Part of our usual excursions there included walks down to the red light district and eating either at mami houses or at Rosie's Diner, where I always managed to find parking. I really miss those times!
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