The Democracy of the Pirate Market

The MRT train arrives at the above-ground Carriedo station and the doors open, a rush of hot air blows into a cabin packed with people that the creaking air con barely cools. I push my way through the crowd to the door, bumping into an elbow here, shoving a backpack aside there, mumbling “Pinagsisisihan.” Tagalog for “Sorry.” The doors slam shut behind me, just when I have finally made it to the platform. A mass of people pushes me down the concrete stairs, two stories to the street, past vendors with baskets full of candy, coconuts, soft drinks, and cigarettes. Once I enter the Avenida Rizal, I have to shelter my eyes against the glaring tropical midday sunlight. An old man sells small towels from a makeshift table – just what I need. I buy one and wipe the sweat from my face.

The Avenida Rizal once was the fanciest shopping street of Manila with its modern department stores, restaurants, and cinemas. It was the main thoroughfare of Quiapo, one of the first suburbs outside of the walls of the historic city center Intramuros, an affluent neighborhood, where the emerging upper class of Manila built their villas and mansions from 1900 onward. Twenty cinemas lined the Avenue in the 1950s: the Avenue Theater, designed by National Artist Juan Nakpil in the 1930s, seated over a thousand patrons; the Scala Theater, with its tea rose marble floors and its curved wall made out of glass blocks, was designed by Pablo Antonio, another National Artist for Architecture; and the modernist Ever Theater, which was supposedly praised by German Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, when he visited Manila in the 1950s. Most of these cinemas have been closed, or – like Nakpil's Art Deco-style Avenue – torn down and replaced by a parking lot. The ones that remain, the Jennets and the Lords, show scratched prints of sleazy, violent Filipino soft porn flicks from the 1980s and 1990s and serve as cruising areas for adventurous gay men.

The middle and upper class have long moved on to gated communities in boroughs further and further away from the historic city center, leaving Quiapo to the urban poor.