Which Baguio do we want: A highland Divisoria or a health and recreation destination?

When the makeshift eatery at the top of Session Road just next to Casa Vallejo sprouted some years ago, a lot of people were surprised. How can they get away with something like that right in the middle of the city? It’s a tiny triangular piece of land which looked more like a street island, it seemed quite impossible that the small piece of property belonged to anyone, let alone titled. The bigger surprise was when that crude bulalohan underwent a facelift not too long ago – a more permanent concrete structure now stands in its place.

An ancestral land claim enabled them to do that, someone said. Having coffee with friends at the nearby Hill Station restaurant one afternoon, some joked that one day, someone might just file an ancestral land claim on the whole Casa Vallejo property.

In 1904, Cameron Forbes, a member of the U.S. Philippine Commission, was given the additional designation of being the administrator directly responsible for the implementation of the Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Baguio. At the time, Baguio had nothing much to offer visitors other than a sanitarium. Forbes’ strategy to fast track the transformation of this tiny hill station into a city was to first put an efficient transportation system between the lowlands and Baguio in place. Lyman Kennon then was already making great progress with the construction of the Benguet Road (which would eventually be named after him), so Forbes, after pressuring the Manila Railroad Company to bring their tracks closer to the foothills of Benguet to significantly cut the travel time from Manila, then pressured the colonial government to allocate funds for the purchase of a couple of Stanley Steamliners to bring up passengers from La Union all the way to Baguio.

And while the government wouldn’t allocate funds any more for the construction of more structures in Baguio, Forbes was able to get its permission to invite the private sector to step in and invest in various initiatives that would help make Baguio become a tourist destination. One of those who responded was Salvador Vallejo, who leased the property from the government and put up a hotel bearing his name just below Luneta Hill.

During the first World War, it briefly served as a detention center for German prisoners of war before returning to its original function of housing tourists during the mining boom in Benguet in the 1920’s. It was turned into a refugee center during the second World War and after surviving the carpet bombing of the city during the liberation, it served as a temporary campus for the Baguio City High School (now the Baguio City National High School).

After some time, the hotel closed down and the property was ceded back to the government. The original building that has witnessed almost all of Baguio’s entire history as a city remained standing. It closed down in 1997. In 2008, the National Resources Development Corporation expressed its intention to invite private bidders to develop the property. The City Council then tried to get Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to transfer ownership of the site to the City Government, but the bidding proceeded, with Roebling Corporation emerging as the winner. Then Mayor Reinaldo Bautista, Jr. welcomed the decision of the winning bidders to maintain the structure’s original function – a hotel, and while they planned to do some major renovation work, much of the structure, including the original façade would be maintained to respect its historical significance.

Major surprises seem to always come with the new year in Baguio – after the New Year’s revelation of SM City Baguio’s plan to remove 182 trees on Luneta Hill in 2012, now comes the news that Casa Vallejo’s current tenants are being evicted in view of the Certificate of Ancestral Land Title awarded by the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples to a family that claimed ownership of the property. We have heard of several major ancestral land claims in the city – the Caranteses and Luneta Hill, the Carinos and portions of Camp John Hay, etc., but we never knew that a major piece of property right in the heart of the city was being claimed too. I myself have read a lot about how Mateo Carino owned much of the land from City Hall to Camp John Hay and was quite surprised to learn that a piece of land right in the middle could belong to another family.

Allegedly, the property would now be developed into a mall. Another major piece of Baguio’s history is about to be erased forever. Another mall? That is really sad because with all the other malls in Baguio today, the city is fast becoming what it is not: a shopping center.

This shouldn’t be allowed to happen because, really, which Baguio do we really want: a highland Divisoria or the way its pioneers intended it to be: a health and recreation destination and a community living in harmony with its natural environment?

*sign the petition to save Casa Vallejho here: http://www.change.org/ph/mga-petisyon/felipe-de-leon-jr-chairman-national-commission-on-culture-and-the-arts-declare-the-1909-casa-vallejo-building-in-baguio-city-a-heritage-site-or-important-cultural-property-and-ensure-its-future-protection-and-preservation