Remember Teachers Camp?

Although we spent our four years in the "new" BCHS at Governor Pack Road, Teachers Camp was City High for many of CT hi'ers: Class 55 was the first fourth year class to graduate from Gov. Pack. My sister Carmen was in that class: she remembers she and her seatmate carrying those two-seater desks all the way from Teachers Camp to Gov. Pack. Nagdagsen cano.
The photo is a typical Baguio cottage transplanted from the USA: it tickles my nostalgia-for-Baguio bones.

MANILA, Philippines -- Who does not remember Teachers Camp? For the past five or six generations, almost every Filipino teacher or student has had a Teachers Camp experience, spending a few education-enriching days or even a fortnight, for the fortunate few, in green-and-white pre-war cottages under the pines in cool Baguio air to attend a live-in conference or training event.

Teachers Camp, founded in 1908 by the US colonial government as a mountain retreat for the first group of American teachers, the Thomasites, needing a respite from lowland tropical heat, has a unique heritage. Since its early Thomasite days, generations of Filipino teachers and students have gone to Teachers Camp for educational training, conferences and seminars.

It is a place intrinsic to the history of the Department of Education and has become part of the educational ethos of many Filipinos. It is a nationally recognized teaching facility, also one of the nationally recognized Baguio City icons along with Session Road, Burnham Park, Mansion House, Wright Park and Camp John Hay. It is the last of the large, open, undeveloped parcels of government-owned land remaining in Baguio. The other large parcel, Camp John Hay, is now privatized as a mixed-use real-estate development.

Founded as a rest and recreation facility for teachers and also as a venue for summer training programs for teachers, education is the primary legacy of Teachers Camp. Its secondary legacy is that it is one of the few surviving Baguio environments today, a wide-open area still relatively forested with pine trees and landscaped in the typical but vanishing flowered Baguio garden style, where original green-and-white wooden architecture, once a Baguio City hallmark, still survives.

Hill stations

The American colonial government built Baguio in the early years of the 20th century. However, Baguio has never taken its deserved place in the Asian chain of colonial Hill Stations (Simla and Darjeeling in British India, Bandung in Dutch Indonesia, Cameron Highlands in British Malaysia, Dalat in French Indochina).

Making Baguio stand out in this chain of upland vacation retreats is the fact that it is the only American-designed Hill Station in Asia. The green-and-white American-style wooden architecture once so prevalent in the Baguio mountain terrain is the only one of its kind in Asia.

Baguio is of pedigreed origin and Teachers Camp is part of that pedigree. Designed by Daniel Burnham, the leading American urban planner of the day, vast urban parks (Burnham and Wright Parks) opened up broad city and mountain vistas and served as visual and circulation anchors for the city.

A network of winding roads connected main points of the city—the City Hall overlooking a large park with a lagoon (now known as Burnham Park), Mansion House (the summer residence of the Philippine president), Camp John Hay (former American military rest and recreation facility), and Teachers Camp.

Session Road, the city commercial center that leads uphill in a straight line from the Baguio Market now connects to a new mall at its top end. It is likewise well-known throughout the Philippines as part of the Baguio image. Today a gigantic new mall at the top of Session Road now seriously threatens the future of its small commercial establishments that have been there for generations.

The distinct Baguio identity of mountainous terrain with green-and-white architecture nestled under pine trees is fast vanishing. The single largest remaining ensemble of that identity survives in Teachers Camp. Although no other city in Asia or in the Philippines has an identity like Baguio’s, the identity today is vanishing rapidly.

Baguio in decay

Unregulated development has caused Baguio to lose its luster as the Philippines’ most popular mountain retreat. Nondescript concrete buildings and residences have replaced the traditional green-and-white architecture. Informal settlers’ shanties now cover urban mountain vistas, once open green spaces, in sheets of rusted tin roofing.

Pine trees, once a familiar sight of Baguio landscape, have practically disappeared. Heritage, whether urban, architectural, or landscape, neither protected by legislation or by zoning, does not appear to be within the sphere of interest of most city authorities and residents, therefore urban and architectural heritage is going fast, and vanishing rapidly also is its landmark umbrella of pines and multicolored flowers.

Present-day Baguio is homogenizing into the generic, typical look of 21st-century Philippine cities. Only its mountainous terrain now reminds us that once this was the glorious Summer Capital of our Land and the only American Hill Station in Asia.

Since Baguio mystique and tradition are practically gone today, it is necessary to maintain whatever is left of its urban, architectural, and environmental traditions for the future.

On the eve of its 2008 centenary, Teachers Camp acknowledges its unique place as one of the principal government educational facilities in the Philippines that has consistently provided teacher training since 1908 in the traditional “Old Baguio” setting so intrinsic to the Teachers Camp image and ambiance.

Since both traditions, education and setting, are so intertwined, it is impossible to look at conserving one without the other.

Teachers Camp authorities are now looking at conserving the physical aspect of Teachers Camp heritage—its architecture, landscaping and infrastructure—while updating the entire facility and its physical plant to achieve 21st-century demands to continue its educational focus and improve its amenities as a rest and recreation facility for educators and students.

Heritage, the basis for the new Teachers Camp improvement efforts, is recognized as the primary resource for future income generation to be conserved and enhanced with new infrastructure, architecture and landscaping, to ensure the economic sustainability that will keep Teachers Camp in the lives of the next five generations of educators and students. By Augusto Villalon. Philippine Daily Inquirer

http://showbizandstyle.inquirer.net/lifestyle/lifestyle/view/20071008-93106/Remember_Teachers_Camp%3F