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Long-time resident reflects on the old, quiet Menteng
Sitting in a living room filled with traditional gamelan instruments and Javanese ornaments, Gito Purnomo, 58, recalled what Menteng was like during in his childhood
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Sitting in a living room filled with traditional gamelan instruments and Javanese ornaments, Gito Purnomo, 58, recalled what Menteng was like during in his childhood.
"I was 10 years old when I moved to Menteng in 1961," he told The Jakarta Post recently.
"At the time, if you walked around the area, you might have noticed that many houses were alike," he said.
"Even my house has the same design as two other houses beside it," said Gito, who lives in a bungalow-style house on Jl. Prof. Mohammad Yamin in Menteng, Central Jakarta.
Gito, a retired Jakarta administration official, said his family inherited the house from his grandmother.
"This house was built in 1937," said Gito, son to the late Mang Udel, a noted Indonesian actor, comedian and radio announcer.
"My grandmother asked my father not to sell this house."
After graduating high school in 1968, Gito moved to Bandung, West Java, and enrolled in the Bandung Institute of Technology.
He returned to Jakarta in 1975 and started working for the Jakarta administration.
"At the time, Central Jakarta was in a period of rapid development.
"Slowly but surely, several streets in Menteng became more crowded as more vehicles took to the streets in order to go to the city's business district," he said.
"In the mid-1980s, business ventures started to mushroom along the side of the road.
"And by the early 1990s, most houses along roads like on Jl. HOS Cokroaminoto and Jl. Teuku Cik Ditiro had been converted into offices, restaurants, hospitals, beauty clinics and many other business."
The Dutch built Menteng in the 1920s to provide housing for upper-class residents, mostly European and local VIPs.
The 607-hectare area was filled with gardens and became the first garden suburb in Jakarta.
There were seven different types of houses built in Meteng - class 1 to class 7 - which were designed adopting several different styles, including Art Nouveau, Amsterdam, De' Stijl, traditional Indonesian, and Dutch Bungalow.
Class 1 to 3 houses were built for European residents or high-rank officials, and class 4 to 7 were for local government officials.
The city administration has categorized a number of buildings in several areas, including Menteng, as cultural heritage sites.
According to the 1999 bylaw on the utilization and preservation of cultural heritage buildings and areas, the city administration forbids Menteng residents renovating houses with an A status, and only allows for limited changes to B- and C-status houses.
There are currently 273 heritage buildings around Jakarta, in areas such as Menteng, Kota, Condet and Kebayoran, according to city tourism and culture agency data.
Obligated to preserve his house and paying expensive taxes, Gito said he was feeling burdened.
"Last year, I spent more than Rp 14 million on paying land and building taxes," he said.
"I asked my son to help me pay the taxes. Otherwise, I would not have been able to pay them."
Gito said he had seen many old friends move out due to the unaffordable taxes.
"Menteng has become more strategic," he said. "Many of my old friends have sold their houses because they can no longer afford to pay the taxes." (hwa)
