Photo of the Government Building in Batangas Town [July 1914, BPW Quarterly Bulletin]

This photograph is part of a series showing construction projects undertaken by the Bureau of Public Works during the American colonial era. All photographs have been digitally extracted from the Quarterly Bulletins of the bureau and processed using graphics editing software to improve quality. It goes without saying that the eventual output of each extract was always going to be dependent on the quality of the original scan.

The photo below is a photograph of the municipal building called “presidencia” in the then-town and now city of Batangas. A 1914 Bureau of Public Works report noted that few of the towns in Batangas were at the time able to afford “suitable municipal government buildings,” and that a few of the towns had to rent private residences for use as government buildings.

The town of Batangas, however, was not one of those. In fact, in 1914 it had the only modern government building in the province, a two-story structure which cost approximately ₱22,000.00 to build. Moreover, the grounds surrounding this building had “been laid out attractively and are well kept, thus adding materially to the progressive appearance of the city hall.”

¹ “Bureau of Public Works Quarterly Bulletin, Volume 2 No. 4,” compiiled by C.A. Tansill, published July 1914 in Manila by the Bureau of Public Works.