![]() ![]() In addition, he also bought out another cinema house, Empire Theater, from its owners, which he paid for in kind with a Mercedes Benz motorized karwahe. It was Don Jose Avila who bought out the old Teatro Junquera from its original American owner at Colon corner Legazpi Street in the early 1930s, remodeled it, and renamed it Cinema Oriente. Bourne and William Parsons, respectively), Avila supervised the design and erection of Plaza Independencia and Plaza Rizal in the city core. Working with American architects (most likely Daniel K. He was responsible for planting the original mango trees that used to grace Mango Avenue (now Gen. ![]() Avila also served several governors as Provincial Secretary from the 1900s-1930s (thus his appellation “the little governor”). Among them was Don Jose Avila (1854-1959), who along with Vicente Sotto I founded Cebu’s first newspaper, The Cebu Advertiser in 1920. The Cebuano mestizo families who made their fortunes in the nearby port, and established the social life of the city also took part in the evolution of Colon into Cebu’s business hub by the beginning of the 20th century. With their shaded shop fronts of tile and mahogany posts, and pedestrian pavements of piedra china or coral stone faced in lime plaster, old Colon was like a scene from an early Western movie set in the tropics, the unpaved street alive with horse-drawn tartanillas, water buffalo carts, and coolies pulling passenger rickshaws and hauling produce. The accessorias were joined together to form long arcades that stretched the entire length of the street by the early 1900s, as can be seen in old photographs. The latter still screens films (of the titillating variety common to rundown cinemas). It is in a state of disrepair, as seen in the missing panes of blue glass in the Ultra Vistarama. Right: Another cinema rounds out the more metropolitan approach to the International Style, in the form of the glass-and-steel façade of the Ultra Vistarama cinema. Eden is still run as a theater, offering mostly second run Hollywood or Tagalog films. READ MORE: Pobs before the pubs: Poblacion heritage you need to know Left: Eden Theater, right next to Vision, is built in the International Style flavor of the 50s, with its two-storey, heavily screened plain-boxed façade offering views of the hulking auditorium structure at its rear. Separating urbanidad from the indio-dominated interior, Colon also served as the convenient meeting point at which produce from the uplands flowed into the city through the two-storey shop houses known as accessorias, owned and manned by enterprising Chinese mestizos who intermarried with the Spaniards and indios, and formed the economic backbone of the city. The 1873 Escondrillas Map shows Colon as a meandering northeast-to-southwest margin of the city, beyond which was blank space- the uncultivated realengas where few Spaniards dared walk by themselves at night. It was the administrative center of Spanish domains in the Visayas, Mindanao and the western Pacific- all the way to the Marianas, in fact.Ĭebu City’s old core of buildings and residential blocks were built according to the grid layout of the Recopilacion de las Islas, and it was bound on the northwest by a long, diagonal road named after explorer Christopher Columbus-Colon being the Hispanicized name of Columbus. It dates back from the time when Cebu was the first colonial capital from 1565 to 1567, before the capital was moved to Iloilo, and then Manila. ![]() Just as Avenida Rizal in Santa Cruz was the chief street on which business and entertainment in Manila were concentrated from the 1930s to the 1970s, so was Colon Street for Cebu City from the 1910s until the 1990s.Ĭolon Street has the distinction of being the oldest street in the Philippines. ![]()
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