I FIRST visited the innocuous looking Harrison Plaza shopping centre in downtown Malate in 1979, when the mall had become the latest target of a series of bomb blasts which killed several people in Manila's public places.
Even then I realised the shoe-box shaped mall (its biggest tenant is the Shoemart store) was no ordinary shopping venue; there were strange vibes about the place, oddball fung shui, although perhaps that emanated from Manila Zoo, which is appropriately located next door.
Only a small percentage of people actually go to Harrison Plaza to shop. Most, like myself, dash in there to get out of the heat because the air conditioning in the football stadium-sized complex is beamed straight down from the temperature controllers in heaven. It appears there really are advantages to living in the only Christian country in Asia.
A sort of community in Harrison Plaza makes it more of a town - with its own line-up of characters and eclectic lifestyle - than a shopping mall with a chronology only of impersonal stop-start rhythms.
For instance, there is a big circular seat in the arcade's centre which is both a popular meeting place for locals and an unofficial 'touch base' for the homeless and the poor who pour in from the provinces, camping in its vicinity until they find a permanent place to live.
Not surprisingly, this is a favourite hunting ground for those who prey on the weak, including, most horribly, several expatriate paedophiles who sit in a nearby office like rock spiders waiting to pounce on unsuspecting and mostly defenceless prey.