BAGUIO CITY – The rest of the world counted down to 2009 on Wednesday midnight but Baguio’s 300,000 residents spent their New Year’s Eve revelry by marking down the hours to the summer capital’s centennial year.

Simultaneous fireworks display – from the top of City Hall to the forested compounds of Camp John Hay and the Baguio Country Club – signaled the start of Baguio’s 100th year celebrations.

Baguio City was chartered in May 1909, after former American Governor-General William Cameron Forbes executed the initial designs for a close-knit city of 30,000 residents that were rendered by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham.

The American colonial government had commissioned Burnham to plan for a community hill station or resort-like sanitarium atop the cool mountains of Benguet that would serve as the officials’ refuge from the heat in the lowlands.

Burnham only had nine days to survey the prospective Benguet territories before settling down to draw how Baguio was to be shaped, according to author Robert Reed’s “City of Pines,” the definitive book on Baguio’s origins.

In the wee hours of Jan. 1, church leaders and a civic organization also revived the City Beautiful Movement, which was launched in the first quarter of the 20th century by the man who designed Baguio City.

This was a movement of academic scholars that believed in Burnham’s urban architectures, which managed the growth of modern cities by blending function with beautification.

Benedicto Alhambra, city tourism officer, and members of the Baguio Community of Volunteers Movement (BCVM), re-launched the movement, hoping to draw public support for a major conservation, restoration and cleanup drive of the century-old city on the first day of 2009.

Catholic priest Carmelo Carreon, BCVM secretary-general, said they broke up the Centennial year into a 125-day period of advocacy called “pokkawan” (proclamation), a 100-day period of conservation drive called “inarakop” (embrace), and a 145-day period of celebration called “pinawidan.”

They introduced flowers to the oft-mocked concrete pine tree on upper Session Road, which they planned to convert into a giant floral landscape.

President Macapagal Arroyo marked the start of the celebrations by giving gifts to some 3,000 indigents at the Mansion, the official presidential residence in the city.

Ms Arroyo handed out Noche Buena packages to poor barangay residents identified by the Department of Social Welfare and Development as well as selected beneficiaries from La Trinidad, Benguet, and those living near the Mansion.

It was a security nightmare for the Presidential Security Group (PSG), which had to frisk people who entered the mansion before they were led to tents offering free medical services.