This year, in honor of the Mabini Sesquicentennial, the Presidential Communications Development and Strategic Planning Office (PCDSPO) has recommended to rename Nagtahan Bridge to Mabini Bridge.
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| Nagtahan when it was just a pile of wood across the Pasig River. |
It's not so much as a renaming but going back to what it's been officially called decades ago. Apparently, Nagtahan's official name really was "Mabini Bridge," after Marcos's Proclamation of 1967. But we know what happened with that effort. Since it was built in 1945, and rebuilt in the 1960s after a barge rammed into the wooden piles, the bridge on Nagtahan Street has always been called Nagtahan and nothing else.* Presidential proclamations notwithstanding. The Malacanan briefer has this to say: "However, little notice was made of this, and in time the name was forgotten."
And so they try one more time. They even had the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) change all pertinent road signs to read as such.
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| This bridge shall now be called Mabini, okay? |
Even in Ingress, the portal that exists is not the bridge per se, but the image of Apolinario Mabini near the top of the bridge's crest, in the general area of where the Mabini Shrine used to be.
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| Ohai, Apolinario Mabini! |
*It's the same way with Otis, now known as Paz Guanzon. All the bus signs still say Otis. Even all the establishments along that road refer to it as Otis. Some names have a way of staying "sticky" that even several generations and name changes later, people still know it by the name they have always known.
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