OVER the past few days an online petition, “Save Rizal Memorial Sports Complex,” has been gathering slow fire among conservationists, sports fans and plain history buffs.
Even in straightforward prose, the petition makes us see its logic and feel its heart bleed for this cultural treasure. Though antiquated and unstately, Rizal Memorial can still beguile many, as our world champion Manny Pacquiao will eternally proclaim, having once nestled in its bosom.
The old stadium and coliseum are “architectural and historical gems” done in the Art Deco style by its famous architect, Juan Arellano.
But it seems the petition is a defeated rear-guard action.
Property developers, like SM Prime Holdings have come forward with plans that would mindlessly invade, mangle and wreck this sacred ground of heart-tugging triumphs and tearful gold-medal ceremonies of Filipino athletes.
Over its history, amid the cycles of war and rebirth and decay, it has been graced by the great and the phenomenal in sports and in music. In the 1930s, the first home run out of the ballpark was hit by Lou Gehrig of the New York Yankees, followed by the legendary swatter also in pinstripe uniform, Babe Ruth.
Then followed the Yankees invasion in 1955 topped by Hall of Fame-bound legends in Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra and the first sportsman I recognized who wore the Number 7 on his back, the great slugger Mickey Mantle.
In 1966 the songs of the Beatles had two sold-out concerts at the stadium, and in 1989 the tennis behemoths of my youth, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, brought the intensity of their Wimbledon rivalry to the turf of Rizal’s tennis courts.
What other old venue in Southeast Asia has a comparable historical glitter?
But the mall-building spree that has overrun the metropolis since the 1990s maddeningly marches on, crowding out the last few remaining public places of the metropolis.
Unplanned development, many will argue, is erasing the last vestiges of playgrounds and leisure parks that were meant for early-morning walks and late-afternoon runs and chess and dama games by citizens.
We have become a metropolis of malls and traffic; a city without passion and compassion; a once elegant capital without its soul and legacy.
The malls—an icon of progress but also of limitless encroachment into our public space—have wantonly replaced the long-held memory of community and a sense of belonging to a particular place—and attachment to a treasured time.
Walk into a mall and you live for the moment, dazzled and beguiled. Walk through a public park and you can still feel the sun and wind in your face, smell the scent of grass. Rizal Memorial is the closest place we have for enjoying this experience.
It has not outlived its purpose. This is the stand of the Heritage Conservation Society (HCS), which has taken the lead in this effort because of the National Historical Institute’s near-criminal neglect of its duty to try to preserve cultural treasure.
“Proposals to develop the property must include keeping all the public open spaces, especially the football and baseball fields,” the HCS says in a statement.
Will someone, also big-moneyed but with a fine appreciation of our history and legacy, come forward with a plan to preserve Rizal Memorial?
If the march of modernity cannot be stopped, at least someone, a Filipino at heart, must be noble in spirit enough to try to stop a precious part of our cultural legacy from disappearing forever.
Last heard indicated that the man with that vision is Enrique Razon Jr., the man who owns International Container Terminal Services Inc. (ICTSI). Razon can count numbers in seven figures and above. Now he is showing us we can count on him to see things differently from other property developers.
In his preservation plan is a proposal to “maintain and fortify the RMSC façade.” Reassuringly, the plan will not convert it into mall but it will “redevelop” RMSC.
Someone in his camp told me that redesigning old Rizal would entail turning it into an enclave for “modern offices and commercial areas in contemporary buildings.”
The redevelopment would ensure “green open spaces” that would coexist with modern amenities run by smart technologies.
Razon is convincingly saying that the past and present can, and in this instance should, coexist. No need to tear down the old to make way for the new.
This is redevelopment not based on greed, which is now despicably the norm in property development, but on heart, which is a welcome rarity.
I would like to see something else preserved and decreed not to be torn down ever, the baseball stadium’s vintage scoreboard. A throwback to old Rizal’s glorious history, it is manually operated, and sitting on top of it is an analog clock.
You see, it is the only one of its kind that is left among the major sports venues in Asia.