My Rich Kemang, My Poor Kemang

Most people know Kemang now as the bustling, traffic-packed “it” area in South Jakarta. Not exactly next to the chaotic downtown Golden Triangle, but not as far into suburbia as Pondok Indah. Yet I remember what Kemang used to be like before the crowds set in.

I grew up in the west of Jakarta, but spent time painting the town red with a fun bunch from the south, including Kemang. If the Menteng kids were Jakarta’s hipsters of Mom’s generation, the south’s youths have been the reigning cool set since the mid-80s, partly thanks to the popular radio show Catatan Si Boy (Boy’s Diary) where the storyline evolved as the pretty cast cruised along Lintas Melawai in Boy’s flashy convertible.

Nowadays, except for some remaining girlie bars and the legendary mechanical bull ride, Melawai’s cool edge has long been usurped by neighboring areas.

In the early 1990s Jakarta didn’t boast as many nightspots, and few were affordable for students. The closest thing to a college bar was in Kemang-Bangka, with its cheap fried foods and drinks, plus a corner stage that was a launching pad for some of today’s famous bands.

But Kemang was still largely a leafy neighborhood, where small kampong inroads paved the way to the cozy secluded homes of affluent Indonesians and expats. There were some good restaurants, a few nice furniture places, a handful of artsy yet unassuming shops and the iconic KemChicks supermarket, which was for the longest time Jakarta’s go-to place for rare imported consumer goods.

Traffic wasn’t that crowded, and what’s now a one-way detour around McDonald’s was still two-way neighborhood roads. One would invariably find expat mothers pushing strollers or their husbands jogging on weekends along the tree-lined roads, passing pushcart vendors and bajaj.

Surely a nice neighborhood, and deserving of its position as expat enclave.

Then, in the mid-90s, the mainstream “discovered” Kemang. New places sprang up, from to-see-and-be-seen bars to an iconic salsa club, from a fish-n-chips joint to upscale bistros, from plush furniture stores to handicraft kiosks. An old friend’s house was sold and swiftly turned into a Mexican restaurant and hair salon. McDonald’s took over another house nearby, but to its credit kept the original facade and embellished it as an old Javanese house.

The South Jakarta municipal office kicked up a fuss, claiming that most premises lacked permits and vowed to shut them down and return Kemang to its original role as a residential area.

I left Indonesia for a while and returned a few years ago, only to find that all hell had broken loose. Kemang Raya’s grand houses and quiet streets had been turned into a mass of commercial establishments, from standard shop-houses to a couple of buildings modeled on a performance stage and a gigantic marooned ship (both were demolished recently to make way for a supermarket modeled on, hmm, a garage).

Someone decided it was a great idea to build a multistory, all-glass shopping shrine on what’s essentially a piece of earthquake-prone Ring of Fire soil. McDonald’s discarded the much-lauded homage to local architecture for an all-white minimalist eatery that is to me banal as – what a surprise – an American strip mall.

Traffic? Frustrating on weekdays and truly maddening on weekends. The pollution is probably now at such a lung-choking level that no sensible person would jog or push a baby stroller.

At first I hoped that the frenzy would die down, but it hasn’t, and even more houses have been turned into commercial sites – and I can’t fathom why. I guess Mr. Mayor decided the additional jobs created and taxes from the businesses were reason enough not to follow through with the plan to halt them in their tracks. But I’m simply not convinced that these establishments are money-making machines, since I’ve witnessed so many outlets change hands over the years.

My friend’s house went from being a Mexican restaurant to a chic bistro, and then a bank, and is now a sleepy bar. Indonesians love food and eating out, so eateries may just scrape by, but how many people would scramble to buy designer jeans, imported accessories or overpriced knickknacks everyday? Especially in that hellish traffic and with gas at its stupefying prices.

Moreover, when it comes to those cramped three-or-more-story commercial mini-buildings erected over the past few years, does anybody realize that only shops to the second level seem to be surviving so far? Don’t people do feasibility studies anymore before cooking up business plans or hiring construction workers? Or is everyone just following a me-too commercial cattle call?

I’m not ranting. I’m just sad, that the once cool, chic and classy Kemang has turned into another messy, superficially trendy yet soulless area. It is the definitive poster child for Jakarta’s notoriously poor city planning, underscored by the presumably noble intention of returning it to a residential area by permitting the construction of a luxurious apartment-hotel-hospital-school behemoth, leaving me bewildered as to how it will deal with Kemang’s chronic traffic and flood problems.

Or, the one development that pains me the most, is what I see as the cookie-cutting of an iconic grocery store into yet another high-rise posh compound. Has anyone bothered to consider that, once the two mega projects are completed and inhabited in the next two years as planned, what will happen during rush hour with an additional 2,000 residents (eq. 4,000 cars) pouring into the streets of Kemang Raya, Antasari and Prapanca at the same time? Sure, they whip up the buildings, but are they also capable of building the needed surrounding public roads?

Maybe not a cattle call: I’ll call it a siren’s call instead. I’m tempted to send these bigwigs some old storybooks so they can read about what happened to misguided, besotted sailors who followed the siren’s call into treacherous, shark-infested waters and paid the price for their folly.

Sure, I still occasionally swing by Kemang, and will continue to do so until my trusted hairstylist or that charming vintage shop move somewhere more hospitable. But I admit I am disheartened. My rich Kemang, my poor Kemang. Oh, my so sold-out Kemang.

+ Lynda Ibrahim

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