Dagupan City Hall, a heritage site — AUP chapter

By July 17, 2017Headlines, News

THE Dagupan City Hall has since been declared a heritage site along with the Gabaldon building of the West Central 1 Elementary School and the remnants of the Franklin Bridge in Barangay Poblacion Oeste.

This was revealed by the United Architects of the Philippines (UAP), Pangasinan chapter when it called on Mayor Belen T. Fernandez last week.

The UAP members recalled that Ms. Gemma Cruz Araneta, then as president of the Heritage Conservation Society of the Philippines, came to Dagupan to see then Mayor Benjamin Lim, to inform him that the three were already declared historical sites.

Araneta said the process of verifying the status of the four started in 2003.

In a press conference that followed the courtesy call, Mayor Fernandez said the city hall as ‘heritage site’, cannot be demolished and instead be restored to its old pre-war condition and can be transformed into a museum as her administration intends to do.

Built in 1925, the present city hall of Dagupan is now the oldest city hall throughout the country at 92 years old and needed to be retired, protected and conserved to remind the city of its past, Fernandez told newsmen.

Fernandez said when the city hall was built, the population of Dagupan was only 23,000 – 25,000, yet the same building is still being used to serve the city’s population that has since ballooned to 300,000.

Councilor Jose Netu Tamayo, who joined the press conference, pointed out that the land on which the city hall and the city plaza are situated were donated by the Meneses and Llamas families.

The motivation behind the past donations, he said, is the same motivation behind the donation of Kerwin Fernandez, younger brother of Mayor Fernandez, of 1.2-hectare property to the city as the prospective site for a new city hall.

So far only the Fernandez family has offered to donate land for the planned transfer of the city hall.

Tamayo said Mr. Fernandez wanted to give back to Dagupan (and its people) what it had done for the growth of the family business over the past decades.

Mayor Fernandez said she will sit down shortly with the UAP chapter who volunteered to help restore the original design of the present city hall and other buildings and historical sites in Dagupan in its bid to become a smart city.

The UAP’s revelation, the mayor said, was one of the reasons why then Mayor Lim insisted on buying the idle MC Adore building from the government-owned Assets Privatization Corporation as he intended to give Dagupan a new city hall.

Noting that the Dagupan City hall is now a heritage site, Fernandez asked Councilor Tamayo to propose an ordinance in the city council making it unlawful for future administrations to demolish the present city hall and city plaza for purposes of selling the land.

She said the ordinance is imperative since she recalled that her predecessor had planned on selling the city plaza area to a mall owner from Cebu who wanted to invest in the city.

The mayor pledged she will also work closely with the Department of Education for the preservation of the Gabaldon building and with the Dagupan City Historical Commission for the preservation of the remnants of the Franklin Bridge, the city’s only surviving structure from big flood in the 1930s that washed away the St. Albertus Magnus College, the first sectarian school in Dagupan.

Explaining this, she said, this is because Dagupan City is for service and not into a buy and sell business which was what the past city administration exactly did when it sold MC Adore. (Leonardo Micua)

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