Snoworld™

Finally, after more than 35 years of being under construction, the Southgate Tower (beside Dasmariñas Village corner of EDSA and Pasong Tamo Extension, here in Makati City) is no longer an unfinished business.

It is now called the alphaland SOUTHGATE TOWER & MALL, owned by Alphaland Corporation which is chaired by former trade and industry czar Roberto Ongpin.

Follow up:

(note: All Photos Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Philippines License)

My parents told me that it was built in the 70s era before I was conceived. It was then owned by a Japanese car distributor. Then in the time of President Ferdinand Marcos, the Japanese distributor ran out of money for his project and gave it up to the Philippine National Bank.

Later in the 80s, the Puyat family acquired the property and the unfinished business became their very own. For almost three decades, the Southgate Tower remained, well, a “dream that will never be” landmark of the EDSA-South Super Highway cloverleaf interchange.

Until that day back in early 2008, Mr. Roberto V. Ongpin, chair and CEO of Alphaland Corporation bought it from the Puyat family for ₱1.2 billion. And today, the mall part of the alphaland SOUTHGATE TOWER & MALL opened to the public.

It was set to become the first skyscraper with state-of-the-art offices and high class restaurants. Four decades later, the dream that people have known to be “just a dream” finally materialized.

It also holds a world record for being the longest under construction building in the world, at least according to (if I remember correctly) Bitoy’s World which is a Tagalized version of Ripley’s Believe It or Not (again if I remember it correctly).

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