By Rose Beatrix C. Angeles (Trixie Cruz-Angeles)
INQUIRER.net
First Posted 07/29/2008
My love is like a river in the Sea of Tranquility
“The Arms of Orion”
(theme of Batman Forever)
BEHOLD AND
WEEP- at the totally different face of Manila a hundred years ago, with its
esteros flowing as a network of transportation and trade. In that era, the
American master architect Daniel Burnham “believed that with proper planning he
could turn Manila into a ‘city equal to the greatest of the Western World,’
with a bay like Naples’s, a winding river like Paris’s and canals like those of
Venice,” writes Rose Beatrix Angeles.
(Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian
Institute)
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Manila was becoming known as the Venice of the Far East. This was due
in no small part to the admiration of the practical and aesthetic possibilities
of the esteros or inland rivers by one Daniel Burnham, then architect of
Manila.
Yes, he’s the Burnham of the park in Baguio and the Manila Burnham
plan. Burnham believed that with proper planning he could turn Manila into a
“city equal to the greatest of the Western World,” what with a bay like that of
Naples, a winding river like that of Paris and canals like those of Venice.
