Dominican Hill: the ungrieved death of an iconic seminary

  

  I have written about this subject in an earlier article. However, it doesn’t do justice to treat a subject like this in fewer than 500 words, and just a couple of images.

     So I went back to Dominican Hill one balmy Saturday afternoon to try to "soak in" the biggest story ever to be NOT told about Baguio City. If the story had to be told at all, it has to be by a Baguio boy.

   I grew up around the neighborhood of Mirador and Dominican Hill on the northwest edge of the city. This was around the years between 1968 to about 1980, when Baguio’s population was under 250,000. I have always felt, even as a young boy, that there was something more to the phrase "a city close to heaven" than meets the eye. It was a phrase sometimes used to describe Baguio City. It’s an attempt to allegorize the fact that at 5,000 feet above sea level, Baguio City does in fact soar higher in the atmosphere than its lowland neighbors.

The twin fountains at the center of the atrium must
have been a thing of exquisite beauty in their glory
days, every window inside the ringed hallway lets
you see these fountains from any room in the main
building on both floors.

But it was more than metaphor. If you don’t debate the issue too deeply and simply grant that the mere existence of religious institutions in a city says a lot about its spiritual heritage, then Baguio is a very religious town. That is only one step removed from saying it is a town close to God’s heart.

     It has the only authentic Gothic cathedral outside of Manila. Baguio is the educational capital of the North. But it doesn’t only dispense diplomas in the liberal arts and the sciences. What few people realize is that Baguio, too, is a center of biblical study. This was especially true in the early years--like the 60s and 70s.

     Back then, as a rule of thumb, the male religious ran seminaries, and the women religious ran convents and retreat houses. So priests ran the Recoletos Seminary at the fork of Naguilian and Asin roads, the San Pablo Seminary in Crystal Cave old Bakakeng Central, and the Dominican Seminary at the top of the hill named after them.

     The nuns ran the convents of the Pink Sisters near Brent School, Santa Catalina Daughters of St. Paul along Marcos Highway, one in Outlook Drive beside the Mansion House, called the Sisters of the Little Flower Novitiate, Divine Word retreat house in Leonard Wood Rd., and a famous one, Good Shepherd Convent in Gibraltar Road near Mines View Park.

The grand spiral staircase from the second floor
lands on the main lobby where a 100-bulb
Victorian chandelier used to hang from the 
ceiling. The original 1913 staircase was of 
pinewood, replaced with slabbed concrete during 
its brief interlude as a 5-star hotel in the 70s 

     Presently, a sweeping evangelical revival is buoying up the popularity of pentecostal Christian ministries. This has enhanced the significance of inter-denominational bible schools, the two biggest ones are the Philippine Baptist Theological Seminary (PBTS) in Pinsao Road and the Asia Pacific Theological Seminary (PBTS) in Ambuklao Road. One reputation that Baguio has steadily lost over the years was its distinction as a favorite retreat place. In the 70s, when you talked about "spiritual retreat" the first name that came to your mind was Baguio City. In fact, the peak of tourist arrivals in the city was the annual observance of Lent--more commonly referred to here as "Holy Week."

     That was then. Today, the City Government has all but abandoned Holy Week in its tourism calendar. It frontloads, instead, the monthlong Baguio Flower Festival--or Panagbenga.

    Little wonder then that Baguio City is also, ever so subtly, losing its religious heritage. Superficial ritualism remains high, but that’s about all. Churches are packed on Sundays. But the final priestly benediction, "Let us go and serve the Lord," rings hollow today in the face of the continuing erosion of the city’s religious traditions--and the death, or dereliction, of its once-iconic religious institutions.

These 10-foot tall windows all used to be framed
in ornate wrought-iron sashwork, long since 
vandalized or stolen by looters as for scrap iron

    Diminishing interest in the orthodox priesthood is depressing enrolment in most seminaries. In the end, some of them simply had to close. This was the fate of the Dominican Hill seminary, which ordained its last young priest in 1977.

     I arrived at the site of the old Dominican Hill seminary rather late, around 4:00 p.m. The afternoon sun was beginning to cast long shadows of the few remaining pine trees around. Some local tourists were still sauntering about the yard, taking an obligatory souvenir "selfie" now and then. But not too soon after, I was alone to contemplate the ruin and emptiness of this once grand and anointed institution.

     It’s a large estate, approximately 5 hectares. The once-stately yard is severely unkempt--live bushes untrimmed, the grass unmowed. It just seemed to have been abandoned to thrive on neglect.  As I walked around the crumbling building, I get a chilly and haunting sense of walking after the footsteps of grieving souls, lamenting the derelict state of their "home." I’ve heard stories, as a little boy, that the prayer garden right outside the main building used to be a small cemetery, where old and anonymous priests were buried. It doesn’t sound true, but the eerie silence punctuated by the chirping of birds and the gentle rustle of the wind certainly makes it believable enough.

Some Korean-based ministry once offered to buy
this property and turn it into a 'Prayer Mountain'
headquarter. But most offers to buy are stymied
by unsettled issues about huge unpaid backtaxes.

    The scene is like the setting right out of a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mystery novel. I was decidedly alone, but sometimes I catch the fleeting shadow of something--or someone--that seems to have just crossed the marbled floor to hide behind another pillar. Inside the building, you could almost hear the reverberating echoes of Gregorian chants being sung by an all-boys choir. All the rooms inside the building have been utterly and totally looted of all window grilles, and bathroom fixtures. Nothing is left inside this building that is made of anything else but concrete. All wood, iron and glass have been removed, stolen by looters.

     I felt a tinge of sadness about this, because I remember the ornate sashwork in these five-foot tall windows. The wrought iron was heated, hammered and brazed to form elaborate depictions of scenes from the bible. For one, the Holy Spirit dove was always at the top form of each window grille, and the cruficix was always built into the motif of every piece of sashwork. They were classical pieces of metal art, invaluable to any art curator today. How could looters only see the value of these ironworks in their actual weight as mere scrap metal?

     If you study its layout, the building is a squarish ring with an inner courtyard dominated by two round cascading fountains. They must have been a thing of beauty, because every corridor opened to large windows so you could see these fountains from anywhere inside the building. The rooms ring the inner courtyard on three flanks--the front was where the grand main door opened into a panoramic overview of the whole city of Baguio below it.

When Baguio's legendary afternoon fog starts to
roll in, this prayer garden honoring the black St.
Martin de Porres in the seminary's frontyard gives 
one an awesome feeling of floating in the clouds.

    These once-stately rooms have seen a string of transformations, from elegant bedrooms of the mostly-Belgian friars of the Dominican order who pioneered its construction in the early 1913, to classrooms of the seminary years until the late 70s, to 5-star hotel suite when the whole place was converted into the posh but ill-starred Diplomat Hotel, to storage places of debris. Today, they are a mute statement of demise and neglect.

    If you stand in the main hall and close your eyes, you can still imagine how it must have looked like in its prime. Long flowing white stately drapery behind delicately-embroidered doilies, bright glow of its 100-bulb Victorian chandelier, and in the background a warm fire by the hearth as the red cinderblock fireplace burned aromatic pine wood

    But you open your eyes--snap back to current time--and all you see is a skeleton of a once theatrical circular stairway going up--now slippery with moss. The windows are bare openings, the hallways are empty labyrinths leading to no place of any real significance.

A glint from a Baguio sunset casts a sepia silhouette
of the seminary's main arch. All past attempts to
repurpose this building for worldly enterprises--
from a swinging 70s nightclub or even a casino
have failed. God doesn't seem to approve its use
for other than spiritual edification. People simply
don't get it. 

    In other countries, landmarks are preserved, their aura of mystery carefully nurtured, their saga propagated. I think about the French monastery of Le Mont Saint Michel--today the stuff of legends. It attracts tourists in droves, who want to imbibe the mystery of the place.

     Will this ever happen to Dominican Hill? I have serious doubts--even though tourists are, for the first time, now free to roam around the place. But the sense of mystery and adventure is quick to fade, once they realize its nothing but an old crumbling building. As propagating legends and nurturing mystery goes, Dominican Hill fared much better when I was a little boy. I could walk up to the compound (there was not even a gate then, there is one now) and actually hear the seminarians singing hymns. But I couldn’t see them. No one was allowed to enter and disturb the cloistered monks.

There used to be a vacant grassy lot alongside the
long ascending road leading up to the seminary.
It's gone now, replaced by an "antenna farm" gangly
reaching up the skies in a more secular and digital
mode of communication. Dominican Hill, after all, 
is the highest point within Baguio City proper.

     The city government had approved legislation declaring Dominican Hill a "heritage site." What they meant to accomplish by that, I’m not so sure. The law didn’t come with any funding to accomplish anything. Instead, it just opened the flood gate for culture vultures to try to find any way of transforming the awareness into measurable gain. More proposals for hotel conversion have been received. Certainly, improvements in transportation, communication and marketing now make this an attractive buy for developers.

     Unofficially, several evangelical Christian ministries have "ordained" the hill as a "prayer mountain." One local ministry dominated by South Koreans is talking about claiming the hill as an inheritance from God--although God would not give them a title or deed. Perhaps the heavens would open and pour out resources to enable them to acquire the property. It would not be the first significant asset that these well-funded Koreans would acquire in the city--nor the last.

     All this is attended by a lot of talk about privatizing the sprawling estate to pave the way for a private purchase. Technically, on record, it is owned by the government--although nobody seems quite sure which government: local or national.

By all accounts, Dominican Hill remains probably
the most beautiful, best preserved enclave of peace
and solitude, its unviability for most commercial
use becoming the very factor that preserves it. 

 When Dominican Hill was commercialized and turned into a losing hotel business, it was financed by loans from a national bank, which soon foreclosed on the mortgage. But the inactivity left local taxes unpaid, entitling the local government to a lien over the same asset. The stalemate keeps Dominican Hill in limbo

    The high place, the high wind and the cool November afternoon sun can play tricks in your mind. As I continued to walk around and shoot pictures, I see vignettes of the past, and faint forebodings of the future. Only the present looks bleak. Someday, this place will throb with anointed activity once more. History had already shown that God did not prefer to see this place become a brothel or a gambling den (it hosted a casino in the 1980s)--certainly He wants it to be re-dedicated to a nobler purpose.

Just a stone's throw away from Dominican hill is its
"sister shrine" the Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes
on Mirador Hill. This place, too, is almost going
the way of Dominican Hill, its famous 327-step
"stairway to heaven" beginning to fall into its own
sad state of dereliction unless a serious conservation
effort is undertaken soon.

    It’s enough to set one’s dreams in motion. Mine, at least. One day, if I woke up and I was Bill Gates--if I had a few hundred million dollars to throw away--I would lose no time buying this unpromising derelict building and build something out of it. If it were up to me, I would rebuild this place as a bible college, and redeem its proud history as a beacon of spiritual influence to the city it overlooks. Is it at all feasible? Who knows... 

    In the movie Field of Dreams, a man built a baseball park in the middle of a corn field to invite the departed heros of the game to play one last great game. His neighbors gave him the "Noah treatment" mocking his pointless project, asking him if he  seriously believed his fabled roster of dearly departed ball players would really show up. He pressed on, urged by an epiphanic voice that told him, "If you build it, they will come."

    Someday I hope to see someone build this place again, if not to be that someone myself.  (all photos copyright 2010 Joel R. Dizon)

RECENTLY, I also launched my own YouTube channel and I made a short video about this same material but from a different perspective. You can view that video by clicking the image link below:

NOTE FROM JOEL: Hi, folks! Recently, I started a YouTube channel which is called "Parables and Reason" It  is kind of similar to this blog content-wise. You can check out my channel by clicking the link below:

 Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON