Not all the action was in the streets then. The middle class (of which the characters in the film were part of) enjoyed some improvement in their urban lives. In the movie, references were made on leisure time spent in Makati and Cubao (Ali Mall). Another venue of emerging suburban bliss then was the Greenhills Commercial Center. I dug into some archives and went to take a look at the old place again. A lot has changed, and yet, like Cubao, much remains the same.
Greenhills, along with White Plains, Blue Ridge and Wack Wack subdivisions, filled the gap between Makati and Cubao/PhilAm ends of the highway. These subdivisions were named after famous new towns (planned communities) in eastern United States. The original Greenhills was one of the first post-war suburban greenbelt towns encouraged by the US government to allow the dispersal of the American population (part of a strategy to minimize losses from possible attacks with weapons of mass destruction in the cold-war era).
These place names were appropriated by local developers. However, the choices were not really all that appropriate. One of my planning professors once pointed out that Greenhills has no hills and is actually very flat, White Plains is hilly and Blue Ridge was brown (at least back then when not many trees were growing). Nevertheless, these subdivisions were popular among the upper-class refugees escaping the blight of central Manila.
My memories of Greenhills are vivid. My family moved to Baryo Kapitolyo (one of several subdivisions that sprouted along Shaw Boulevard) in the mid-’60s. We did not have a church in that "village" then, so our folks packed us off to Greenhills Church for Mass every Sunday. We did not mind because that meant that Unimart and other treats were next.
Unimart was the first structure or anchor tenant. This was followed quickly by the Manilabank Arcade, the Greenhills Theater and Coronado lanes. In the Seventies, Shoppesville was built and then that "Mazinger Z" of a building, Virra Mall, emerged.
In between and inside, the center had a large landscaped garden with a running brook. I never cared much for this landscape since it did not relate well with the arcades and had many odd corners with no windows or exits. The outdoor design was inferior to Ayala Commercial Center’s pedestrianized and art-filled landscape architecture.
My favorite places were the Manilabank Arcade and Greenhills Theater. The arcade was great because of its interesting little stores, particularly Fun House, and other hobby and sports shops. I frequented the theater because it was the only other good cinema along with Rizal Theater in Makati (Ali Mall’s cinemas were good, too, but Greenhills was nearer and traffic there was less problematic – then.)
Heredia was influenced by the modernist German architect Mies Van der Rhoe. Mies’ Berlin Museum was one of the most-talked-about structure in the mid-Sixties (along with Yamasaki’s World Trade Center twin towers, which was still in construction). The museum was a column-free steel structure forming a minimalist box of glass. Heredia’s theater followed a similar formula but used concrete instead of glass and steel.
The theater was innovative in that it had a large front verandah that served as a weather-protected outer lobby. The theater was also larger than the Rizal Theater in size and capacity. Although it was smaller than the New Frontier Theater, it was more comfortable than that Cubao behemoth. Finally, Greenhills Theater was also one of the first buildings to allow access for the disabled. Children enjoyed rushing up and down the long ramps.
In the late ’80s and into the ’90s, commercialization reached outside the center’s borders. Annapolis and Ortigas Avenue itself went the "strip development" route while Wilson St. was going on its own course to unruly, trafficky, billboardy development.
I remember frequenting Half-way Inn somewhere halfway down Annapolis. A friend lived further down the road and my friends and I were trying to convince her father to convert their place into a pub to compete with the popular Inn. We were going to name it All the Way Inn.
Well, that adventure did not push through thankfully. (We would have drunk our own profits.) What pushed on though was the commercialization of the fringes of the subdivision itself and the increase in traffic both in the center and along Ortigas Avenue (thanks in part to La Salle).
Unimart is still, well, Unimart. Almost nothing has changed inside. The Manilabank Arcade has changed color with the times and I can’t find my old favorite shops anymore. The interior garden is still there, its formerly clear water now algae-green. The rest of the in-between spaces still look inbetweenish, while the traffic seems to be manageable with the one-way system.
The biggest change, however, has been the Greenhills Theater. Entertainment shifted to the Music Museum in the late ’80s and ’90s. The theater itself fell to disrepair with the newer Cineplex taking the wind out of its sails. Recently, however, the facility underwent a major makeover.
New operators (led by Precy Tolentino, the driving force behind the Music Museum) gutted out the large interior to convert it into a twin-cineplex, mixed-use, fancy-café happening place. It worked! Greenhillenios (Greenhillers? … Greenies? … Hillers?) are now flocking back to take in, among other delights, churros y chocolate at Dulcinea, lattes at Starbucks Coffee, and fancy pastries at Delifrance.
The place is now called the Greenhills Theater Mall. Plans are also afoot to tweak the rest of the complex to conform to this newly re-discovered texture of mini-malls, mini-theaters, coffee and lots of micro-activity.
This seems to be so. We do like the controlled crowdedness of shopping and socializing. Scholars would say that this is very Filipino – that our proxemic distances are much closer than the social distance that westerners are used to and find comfortable. Our markets and social life do mirror the ambience of zouks, hawker alleys and barter plazas of Eastern and Asian cultures.
Maybe Greenhills is a hybridized space, one that should be studied along with parts of Cubao, Divisoria, Baclaran and all those other ukay-ukayyic interstices of local retail and social interchange. Such studies may yield new paradigms for creating truly Filipino spaces that celebrate our culture but keep us connected to a larger world.
Hey, maybe soon we can eat turon and drink barako with as much yabang as sitting in a fancy café with a hundred-peso Frappucino – the local version of which could be called Flippucino. And, oh yes, I really think Dekada 70 should have won at least for best writing and direction.