Baguio sets P950M to fix city’s first shopping mall
BAGUIO CITY—Heeding the wishes of President Marcos, the city government is set to spend close to a billion pesos for the makeover of Maharlika Livelihood Complex, the summer capital’s first shopping mall that was completed in 1980 at the direction of the President’s mother, then first lady Imelda Marcos.
Mayor Benjamin Magalong had said Mr. Marcos’ one request was to restore Maharlika’s original design the way he remembers it as part of the mountain resort city.
A conservation plan laid out before the Baguio City council on Monday by city planning officer Donna Tabangin would preserve the worn-down building’s original brutalist design and turn its rooftops back to their original “vernacular” design that simulated traditional houses in Benguet and Mountain Province.
Tabangin, an architect, said the plan approved on Sept. 29 by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines would also bring back Maharlika’s unique “stepped atrium ceiling” which was an inverted ziggurat (stepped pyramid) that used to draw the eye toward pyramid-like skylight. Most of the building’s interior kept the original walls that featured “deeply raked, combed and bush hammered concrete,” she said.
The conservation plan, which would require an estimated P950.27 million to execute, would construct a better mounting space for the stone market’s original eagle symbol which the late former councilor Narciso Padilla had discovered and returned to the city government. The relic is displayed at Maharlika’s main lobby entrance.
She described Maharlika as a “significant chapter in the post-[World War II] commercial development of Baguio City,” and is “one of [the city’s] purpose-built shopping and livelihood complexes.”
It was conceived to house artisans selling traditional textiles, woodcarvings and silvercraft.
Souvenir hub
Studies from the University of the Philippines Baguio say Maharlika has evolved into the hub of the local souvenir industry across nearly five decades.
The complex was put up when Mr. Marcos’ mother served as minister of human settlements, standing on what used to be part of Baguio’s old stone market built in 1917 by German prisoners of war shortly after the city was built and opened by the American colonial government in 1909.
The stone market was gutted by fire in 1970, a year after it was lined up by the Baguio government for modernization in 1969.
The “burnt area” of the old market was replaced with souvenir shops now called “Marbay” around which that period’s contractor, MG Suntay, had put up the four-story Maharlika at the behest of the state-run Human Settlements Development Corp. (HSDC), which also secured from Baguio a 50-year-lease that expired in May last year.
The HSDC and succeeding entities operated Maharlika until it was absorbed by the Department of Agriculture (DA). The DA, however, returned Maharlika to Baguio as a seven-story building with structural changes that are slowly being taken down by the city government.
After Baguio was designated as the country’s first creative city for folk art and crafts in 2017, policymakers and artists eyed Maharlika as a creative hub.
But a draft ordinance and a financial study drawn up by city government have refashioned Maharlika into a local economic enterprise, which could either be “wholly or partially owned by the local government that generates income through the sale of services and goods to meet a perceived constituency demand,” said lawyer Noelle Grace Rillon-Mateo, assistant city budget officer.
Maharlika needs to be self-sufficient and will earn back what Baguio spent to restore it and improve public services, she said.
The city government expenses may be recovered within 30 years, but other retail schemes such as small leasehold arrangements could be pursued to cut down the recovery period by half, said city treasurer Alex Cabarrubias.
Last year, after Baguio took over Maharlika, rental earnings from over 600 tenants reached P59.357 million. This year, under transitional rules and stall rates, Maharlika rent earnings from January to Oct. 8 was P72.741 million, still short of the city’s administrative expenses of about P103 million for the year. Maharlika currently has 740 “leasable stalls,” and 64 are vacant.
Tabangin pointed out that the road to restoring and improving Maharlika would involve new problems as government proceeds to fix old problems.
