Baguio City’s Burnham Park
Burnham Park is considered as Baguio City’s premier park and it is the most popular park in town. The park features an artificial boating lake in the center and is located right in the middle of Baguio City, and is named after Daniel H Burnham, the American architect and town planner who laid out Baguio. Burnham Park has also an orchidarium, a rose garden, a terrace restaurant, a children’s playground, bicycle lanes, and areas for basketball and other sports.
There are different facilities for recreation and relaxation that are available in the park. At the southern end of the park is a circular skating rink where skates can be rented. There are also tennis and basketball courts, a few restaurants, outdoor kiosks, and a children’s playground. The football field at the eastern side of the park is sometimes used for parades, carnivals, concerts, political rallies, and for display booths during special events and activities. On certain Sundays and some special occasions, cadets of the Philippine Military Academy perform a parade and review or a silent drill exhibition at the field. Just after the big earthquake that hit the city in 1990, many of its residents fled their homes for fear of aftershocks and temporarily set camp in this field.
The park was originally designed as a much-needed green park, to provide a bustling city with a peaceful environment with wide open green spaces, Burnham Park under Filipino administration is now an amusement park with boating, bicycle and skating areas, sports and gaming areas, plus a few eateries. Daniel H. Burnham is the one responsible for this park. He had grand visions for everything he designed. In 1904, the Philippine capital city of Manila, he developed the areas outside the walled city of Intramuros, with a great emphasis on classic-al buildings and wide open spaces, taking into consideration the Philippines’ Spanish influence as Spain had just six years before turned the Philippines over to the Americans. For Baguio, he ‘forced’ a splendid geometric pattern amid rolling hills and winding roads, which is what we know now as Burnham Park, around which the rest of the city was built.
It retains much of Daniel Burnham’s original design and lay-out a century ago, with a few features added, in true Filipino fashion, to make it a vibrant center of activity for everyone to enjoy. Recently, Burnham Park has 12 cluster areas: the man-made lake with rowboats for hire, a children’s playground, the skating rink, the Rose Garden, the Orchidarium, Igorot Garden, Melvin Jones Grandstand, the Athletic Bowl, a Picnic Grove, the Japanese Peace Tower, Pine Trees of the World and Sunshine Park.
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