Like the hangovers it caused, we piece together its modern history through fragments of memory from those who made it.
From above, the Fort Strip appears almost modest. A single block of faded buildings dwarfed by the rising towers of modern Bonifacio Global City (BGC). And yet upon this little strip of earth, countless stories have unfolded as tall as the high-rises that shadow it. Life, after all, is measured not in square meters, but in moments. Through the memories of its creators, developers, and nightlife impresarios, we trace how this strip of earth became both a catalyst and mirror for BGC’s evolving aspirations.
Once part of Fort McKinley, this land stood as a symbolic expansion of America’s frontier pushed beyond the Wild West, past Hawaii, past Guam, into Asia. Where American soldiers once stood guard over a colonial outpost, a different kind of frontier emerged. From intimate connections to splashy headline-making scenes, there was the good, the bad, and the ugly of wet t-shirt contests, celebrity scandals, and of course that infamous stabbing incident.
It is at night when we dream, and it is in nightlife where cities reveal their deepest ambitions. When day surrenders to darkness, a metropolis sheds its practical skin and indulges in possibilities. The Fort Strip was this wild frontier and this dreamscape, a mecca where a generation of Manila’s developer class crafted their destiny and definition of a global city.
“Fort Strip represented BGC,” says Meean Dy, President of Ayala Land, which acquired the development in the early 2000s. “It was a huge success that people started calling Bonifacio Global City the ‘The Fort.'”
After three decades of Filipinos claiming this urban frontier as their own, the Fort Strip closed on January 1, 2025. Its end marks the completion of its own coming-of-age story. “It has served its purpose,” Meean adds, with a developer’s promise: “No goodbyes, it will be better than you remember and what you can imagine.”
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Its final chapter belonged to Nectar, a nightclub and beacon for the LGBTQIA+ community that kept the pulse going until the very end. Before that, an entire generation came of age with Embassy, a superclub that transformed Filipino nightlife for the new millennium. For those whose memories stretch back further, there was Fat Willy’s–if that name triggers a flood of hazy memories, consider yourself vintage. But before all of that, before the Fort as most of us know it, there was simply a golf course next to a military base, unaware of what was coming next.
Property Deal of the Century
The early 1990s marked a pivotal moment in Philippine history as the Senate’s slim 12-11 vote against renewing the Military Bases Agreement ended nearly a century of American military presence in the country. There was, undoubtedly, some psychological reckoning for the nation—who we were, and what we could create without explicit colonial control or patronage. The immediate concern was more concrete: what to do with these vast tracks of land that had for so long been symbols of foreign presence on Filipino soil. Their transformation would test our development capabilities, as well as our imagination of what these spaces could become.
Enter the Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA), signed into law in 1992. At its helm as its first Executive Vice President and Vice Chairman was Rogelio “Babes” Singson, an engineer whose methodical approach to infrastructure would later earn him a reputation as one of the country’s most respected public works secretaries. “The mandate of BaseCon—we called it BaseCon at the time—was to receive all of the military reservations that the US government left behind,” he explains, his voice carrying precise clarity. “Our mandate was to convert them, make them productive, generate employment, and use these military bases as a jumping board for development.”
Included under the jurisdiction of the BCDA was the former Fort McKinley, renamed Fort Bonifacio after the Americans transferred control in 1949. Unlike Clark Air Base or Subic Naval Base, which the US maintained as strategic assets during the Cold War, the army installation had served no vital purpose for American interests in the region. The land lay underdeveloped save for the Philippine Army headquarters and a golf course, the latter a quintessential symbol of colonial leisure and perhaps a precursor to the pursuit of pleasure the Fort would soon represent.
A public bid was held for a controlling stake in what became the Fort Bonifacio Development Corporation (FBDC), a public-private partnership to develop and master plan over 200 hectares of prime real estate at the heart of Metro Manila. The business circles of the country buzzed with excitement over what the press called the “Property Deal of the Century.” Major real estate players and conglomerates, including the Fil-Estate Group, JG Summit Holdings, and Ayala Land, circled the opportunity like players at a high-stakes table.
Bidding day came on January 6, 1995. “We used to joke and say this was the first electronic bidding,” Babes recalls with some amusement. “Of course, we didn’t have laptops, we just had an overhead projector and acetates where they wrote their [bids].”
The room fell silent as the numbers were revealed. The minimum bid set by the BCDA had been ₱10,000 per square meter. Fil-Estate put in ₱23,500 per square, with JG Summit and Ayala Land putting in bids just above ₱24,000. And then, a dark horse emerged. Guided by Cantonese numerology, the Metro Pacific-led consortium bid ₱33,283.88 per square meter, exceeding the closest offer by more than a third.
Dreaming Underground
Sitting in one of the boardrooms of One/NEO, BGC’s pioneering high-rise that would transform the district’s commercial landscape, Carlos “Charlie” Rufino pulls out a weathered red book, the original master plan that dreamed this city into existence. As Founder and President of the NEO Group, one of the country’s premier real estate development firms, Charlie has shaped much of modern Manila’s skyline. But on that January day in 1995, he was witnessing the beginning.
“At the time, there weren’t a lot of computers, it was just overhead transparency,” he similarly remembers watching from across the room. “The transparency came out, and we won.”
As employee number one (or two, he can’t quite remember) and Senior Vice President for Business Development at FBDC, Charlie would become one of the first dreamers to shape what happened next. Leafing through the master plan’s pages, he recalls a time when this building we are in, and everything around us, was nothing but possibility.
The thoroughfares of Old Manila were built in the Spanish era, with future developments forever constrained by those medieval-like foundations. The commercial districts of Makati emerged from post-war ambition. But here, at the dawn of the new millennium, the developers inherited something unique in Manila’s modern history: flat lands, centrally located, a blank canvas to embrace modernity without the physical or metaphorical baggage of the past. Here lay a chance to answer that pressing question: Who are we and what could we create?
The answer, paradoxically, began underground. There would be no overhead telephone wires. No overhead power lines. No overhead water tanks. Nothing to break the rising skyline. It was a beautiful plan that spoke to Filipino aspirations for world-class development, but as Charlie recalls, “People at the time did not know what a global city meant. They would come here and say, ‘We went there, and nothing has happened.’ Of course! Because it was being done below.”
“Fort Bonifacio was there, but the only thing people knew was that it was a place to go if you wanted to play golf,” he continues. “When we designed Fort Bonifacio, we knew what we wanted it to be at the end of the day. But you cannot go from a golf course to a city overnight.”
“Our job, with Freddie [Tinga, business development manager], who came from Citibank, was to let people know we are here,” Charlie adds. “We had a vast amount of space and no reason for people to go there. So he came up with an idea and I said let’s present it to the Board.”
The Fort Entertainment Center, soon known simply as the Fort Strip, emerged as a five-to-ten-year interim development to spark interest and imagination in the area. FBDC understood that to draw pioneers to unchartered territories, you had to first give them a place to gather, leading with food and entertainment.
They began by convincing Chef Billy King to move his popular French fine dining restaurant Le Soufflé from Makati to the Fort Strip, becoming BGC’s first-ever tenant. This was followed by Fat Willy’s, a restaurant-pub, and “an Italian restaurant that didn’t make it because they were very strict.” Charlie remembers its owner, an Italian, who said, “‘If you like pizza, you have to eat it outside because that’s the pizza side.’ Of course, Filipinos want to order anything they want, where they want.” It was an early lesson in letting spaces take on lives of their own.
And take on a life it did.
“Even before it was built, when it was only the structures, people were doing rave parties. These parties at the time, people would go to a place that really looked out of this world,” Charlie recalls. “It gave us exactly what we wanted. [People would say], ‘Oh, we went there, to that place, and we had our fun. It was nice, but there was a long line to go to the bathroom, so we went to the house in Forbes [Park]. It was so near. We didn’t know there was this fantastic place that was so near.”
Wild, Wild Western Bicutan
If FBDC dreamed underground, their architect dreamed in Technicolor. The “out of this world” design that would define the Fort Strip was the brainchild of Graham Brysland, principal architect at Davenport Campbell Philippines.
“The concept came from Western films because [Fort Bonifacio] was a desert,” recalls Kiko Abarquez, who served as project architect under Brysland, speaking over a phone call. “The earthworks were happening all around. It was probably ten or fifteen hectares of dirt. So [Graham] came up with something that remembers those Wild, Wild West films–a string of saloons, restaurants, pubs, all of that.”
The structure emerged from raw earth like a mirage in concrete and steel. The facade played with geometric blocks in a carnival of colors—sandy beige, deep navy, forest green, and a striking red tower that pinned the sky. Small square windows dotted the buildings like a modernist’s interpretation of a desert pueblo.
“It was something like a Western saloon with Beverly Hills palm trees,” Kiko continues, “if you can picture something like that in your mind.”
The tower, topped with industrial-looking scaffolding, stood as an exclamation point, crowned with flood lamps that would make the facade glow like a beacon in the night. Like the American West saloons and trading posts that inspired its design, the Fort Strip would become a gathering point at the edge of civilization.
“It was a pity that I didn’t take a photo of it at night,” Kiko says, his voice tinged with reverence. “It was majestic… really, just majestic.”
While I tracked down Kiko through a LinkedIn message, in those pre-social media days, a venue’s mythology grew through word of mouth, whispers and phone calls, stories passed across dinner tables and office cubicles. Kiko, having moved on to new projects, watched his creation take on a life of its own through fragments of conversation. New restaurants appeared, and young people began using the colorful facade as backdrops for photos. The frontier town was becoming its own boomtown.
“At one time, I recall, it became controversial even, with the wet t-shirt contests,” Kiko says. “When the news of that came out, people started storming the area.”
The Party’s Just Getting Started
“I had a feeling you were going to ask about that,” says Michael Gibb, the former general manager of Fat Willy’s and a veteran of the Mandarin Oriental Group, when those wet t-shirt contests are brought up. Like any frontier saloon worth its whiskey, Fat Willy’s would earn both fame and infamy in Manila’s new territory. But before diving into the controversy, let’s rewind to its audacious beginnings.
“The founder and creator of Fat Willy’s was a guy called Ramsay Wilson,” says Michael. “He loved music, he loved cigars, he loved having a good time.”
Together with his business partner Gerry Wallace, through their firm Let Us Entertain You, Michael brought their international hospitality experience to transform Ramsay’s dream into reality. The blank canvas of a former military base offered freedom from the constraints and expectations of Manila’s established entertainment districts.
“There was nothing else around,” Michael recalls. “There was Fat Willy’s, Le Soufflé, Mondo, Bob’s Big Boy, and an Italian restaurant that I can’t remember the name of. An Italian restaurant with no pizza. You have to go somewhere to get pizza. The owner was Italian and he wouldn’t allow pizza inside. Crazy.”
We are in one of the many restaurants that now fill BGC, and nobody around us knows that here we sit with one of the original tenants. Michael pulls out a commemorative ₱500 coin from 1997 with the face of Andres Bonifacio, a gift from Charlie and FBDC after Fat Willy’s opened. I send Charlie a photo, and he replies with a wide grin emoji, adding, “Wow, he kept it. Yes, this was special for us.”
Everyone had high hopes, and still what emerged exceeded their wildest visions. On peak nights, up to 3,000 revelers would flood Fat Willy’s. “Obviously not inside, but inside and outside,” Michael clarifies. The scene would spill beyond the establishment walls and claim the barren lands outside. Young pioneers would park their cars in the dirt, turning trunks into makeshift bars. Fat Willy’s embraced the organic expansion, setting up outdoor bars and letting their music–including the era’s “I’m so horny, horny, horny” anthem–echo across the expanse.
The space evolved with the community. The Fat Willy’s Exchange, ostensibly a bulletin board for drink specials, became a stage where patrons would dance, sing, and even make proposals of marriage. In a city still finding its nightlife identity, Fat Willy’s became, as Michael puts it, “the place to see and be seen.”
By 1999, the Wall Street Journal was paying notice. “Life in the Philippines’ metropolis of tomorrow,” they proclaim, “now revolves around a bar called Fat Willy’s, home to wet t-shirt contests, late-night drinking, and dancing on countertops.” The article captured both the Fort Strip’s wild energy and the tensions it would soon face.
The infamous wet t-shirt contests would become Fat Willy’s scarlet letter. The same article reported on a closure order from the local government that shut the space up for several days following the contests. “First of all, nothing really untoward happened,” Michael maintains. “In the press, there were stories circulating about the closure and the bad things happening to the Philippine youth and women. It was all not true.”
Nevertheless, the scandal took its toll, and Fat Willy’s eventually sold to their neighbor, Chef King of Le Soufflé, who transformed the saloon into a refined steakhouse. But by then, the Fort Strip had proved what it would become: a magnet for Manila’s nightlife and youthful ambitions, controversy and all.
A Second Life
“I’m like a town crier,” says eventologist and entrepreneur Tim Yap, whose annual birthday celebrations have become a ritual of Manila’s evolving nightlife. He serves as a cultural herald, “baptizing” new venues with parties that bring together the city’s fashion, media, business, and society circles. He remembers once considering Fat Willy’s for his celebration before choosing Mondo, another venue on the Fort Strip “because Fat Willy’s was going through some controversy and they got closed because of a wet t-shirt contest.”
“At the time, it was a very small community,” he says. “So the wet t-shirt contest, the wet t-shirt thing, was so big.” It would not be long, however, before Tim and his partners would find themselves, too, at the other end of celebrity, controversies, and closures along the Fort Strip.
By the early 2000s, the frontier spirit of Fat Willy’s had played out its Wild West drama. The 1997 Asian financial crisis had tempered ambitions in the area, and the private controlling stake in FBDC had been sold to Ayala Land and Evergreen Holdings in 2003. The Fort lay dormant, awaiting its next iteration. Enter Erik Cua, an ambitious young entrepreneur fresh from his success with Temple Bar in Makati, who saw in this quiet stretch of concrete the potential for Manila’s first true superclub.
“[The Fort Strip] was closed when Embassy opened there,” says Erik in an email. “Before it was very busy with Fat Willy’s, Mondo, Big Boy, but it had its time and they all closed down, so the Fort Strip was dead. Embassy started the second life.”
What followed was a carefully curated dream team: John Herrera, a DJ who would orchestrate the music; Fernando Aracama, a chef to elevate the culinary experience; and Tim Yap, whose PR savvy would help craft the narrative. “We were like… I don’t want to say the four horsemen because that’s like the apocalypse,” Tim laughs, though the reference feels apt as they were indeed harbingers of the old Fort’s end and a new era’s beginning. “What bonded the four of us together was that we wanted Manila to have a proper dance floor.”
In the past, there were nostalgic 1980s relics like Stargazer and Euphoria founded by nightlife legend Louie Ysmael, better known as Louie Y. Afterward, the nightlife landscape was dominated by small, intimate bars. Opening in 2004, Embassy reversed course and changed the paradigm.
Conceived as Manila’s first superclub, it existed in three parts: a cafe called Embassy Cafeteria, a dining outlet called Embassy Cuisine, and the nightclub Embassy. Here was BGC’s integrated urban vision in microcosm, a self-contained world where an evening could unfold from dinner to dancing to dawn, all within the same carefully designed space.
There were long lines to enter the club, which opened at 10 PM, with a “door bitch” managing the entrance and enforcing a strict dress code. “It was a different time,” adds Erik. “We don’t do that anymore.” The club had its main room, and another line to get to the VIP area, which used beds as tables.
Tim recalls hosting international pop star Katy Perry after her Manila concert, chasing a bag snatcher who grabbed model Georgina Wilson’s Balenciaga purse, meeting the mother of an heiress at the front door as she asked about for her daughter, and even dancing with former First Lady Imelda Marcos (“She gave me her shoes, I don’t know where I put them”), amongst numerous other anecdotes.
“It was what started the nightlife evolution in Manila,” he proclaims.
Growing Pains
Like early settlers expanding their claims, Embassy refused to stay still. Each whisper of a newer, bigger club elsewhere in Manila sparked another expansion, the venue growing like BGC’s own skyline, upward and outward. When they took over MTV Philippines’ tower space on the Fort Strip, complete with its iconic antenna, the symbolism was clear: local nightlife was now the strongest cultural signal.
“As part of our continuous education in nightlife, we would travel to clubs all over the world,” says Tim. “Not to party—of course, to party—but to also observe and see what was the latest in terms of technology, lighting, and performances.” They returned with visions of table service, champagne sparklers, and the growing trend of private members’ clubs.
This evolution from pure entertainment to cultural cultivation marked Embassy’s most ambitious dream yet. “What people need to understand about spaces like bars or restaurants is that they’re really places of community,” says Jenny Yrasuegui, one of Erik Cua’s first marketing hires, speaking now from one of her establishments that now dot Metro Manila’s dining landscape. “That’s what was special about Members Only.”
Members Only grew out of Embassy’s VIP section. There was a three-tier membership structure, fully consumable. Beyond the beautifully decorated private rooms and premium service, it became an incubator for Manila’s creative class. The Privé Fashion Series highlighted then-emerging talents like Vania Romoff, Charina Sarte, and Rosanna Ocampo, while photo exhibits showcased the works of Paolo Pineda and Raymond Isaac. In the dawn of social media, they brought in bloggers, creating new intersections between nightlife and digital influence.
Despite this cultural ambition, the private members’ club failed to fully capture Manila’s imagination. It evolved into the luxury boutique club Privé, with new partners joining the dream, including GP Reyes, Kim Yao, KC Santi, JM Rodriguez, and nightlife king of kings Louie Y.
“There were so many stories,” JM recalls through voice messages, laughing as he pieces together memories of international stars like Paris Hilton and Martin Garrix, who got drunk on Coffee Patron. He pauses, chuckles, choosing his words carefully. “There were a few situations that were blown out of proportion, like little scandals that happened, but until now we don’t really expound on it.”
Moving On
Every frontier town has its share of gunfights. For Embassy and its iterations, the brawls that would occur, sometimes between high-profile patrons, sometimes allegedly using pepper spray, were playing out in gossip columns and police reports, but soon erupted into headlines.
“The club got closed down first [when] there was a fight between our MC and a guest,” says Erik. “But before this, there were already a couple of large fights that happened between guests. Then after, there was a stabbing incident.”
The headlines that followed were more than just Embassy’s troubles but a signal that the area had perhaps outgrown its frontier days. In 2008, a complaint alleging patron abuse by a disc jockey prompted local government intervention. Embassy reopened only after implementing enhanced security measures. Around this time, a city-wide liquor curfew was imposed to manage the growing nightlife culture and rowdiness that was starting to be associated with the city, both in the Fort and elsewhere.
A year later, when a businessman was stabbed outside Embassy Cuisine, the authorities were unmovable. The space could only reopen with a fundamentally reimagined “wholesome” concept targeting a “more mature audience,” enhanced security, and extensive surveillance technology. The wild energy that had once drawn people to the area now needed to be tamed to match the district’s evolving character.
By then, the former business development manager of FBDC, who had a hand in the Fort Strip’s initial development, was the City Mayor, ordering the closure of Embassy. Tim shares that a decade after all these incidents, once he became acquainted with Freddie and his wife, “I say to them: ‘You guys gave us such a hard time!'”
Encore (formerly known as Embassy) lasted only a couple of years, closing in 2011 to make way for the Filipino restaurant Aracama. By then, Erik and his partners had already begun expanding their nightlife empire beyond the Fort Strip, launching new venues like Opus and Republiq at Newport, and 71 Gramercy in Century City Manila. That they could successfully consolidate their ventures at The Palace in Uptown BGC, leading to the closure of Privé in the process, spoke volumes about the area’s growth. The district had evolved so extensively that new areas in BGC beyond the Fort were demanding their own landmarks and entertainment zones.
“I wanted Embassy until the end,” Tim reflects with wistfulness in his voice. The name had been chosen with purpose as the founders saw themselves as cultural ambassadors, representing a modern Philippines to the world. In the early days, there was amusing confusion when guests would occasionally end up at the actual US Embassy across town. There was some irony on land that once housed foreign presence, Filipinos had built their own diplomatic mission, one that dealt with the soft power of music, nightlife, and community.
Like its namesake, Embassy served as a cultural outpost, and its closure marked not the end of a venue, but the end of an era when BGC still needed pioneers to prove its worth.
Beyond Borders
In 2016, where Privé once stood, Nectar opened its doors as Manila’s first luxury LGBTQIA+ nightclub. According to TheFortCity.com, the club owner explicitly sought to “take the gay bar out of Malate,” a radical reimagining of queer space that signaled both geographic and social transformation. Outside, over its bright pink front door, a rainbow flag proudly flew, not hidden in some back alley, but a declaration of territorial claim in Metro Manila’s most prestigious, most expensive commercial district. It may be the Fort’s most profound transformation since it had been a military outpost, now a different kind of safe space altogether.
By then, BGC had long since shed its frontier town skin, its skyline a forest of towers, its once-barren space now humming with traffic. Unlike earlier ventures that attracted people to the emerging area, Nectar made a bold statement: queer culture would be celebrated in the heart of Manila’s new center of gravity. Beyond acceptance, the club’s luxury positioning and sophisticated design and programming declared that queer nightlife could be aspirational. In this way, Nectar fulfilled BGC’s original vision of world-class development expanding beyond the physical space to the very definition of what belonged in a global city.
Before shows like Drag Race Philippines and Drag Den brought Filipino drag culture into living rooms, Nectar’s monthly Drag Cartel competition was already nurturing local talent. The competition was a launchpad for a new generation of performers such as Marina Summers, Taylor Sheesh, and Minty Fresh, who would become known beyond the queer community into the mainstream.
Like the Fort itself, Nectar’s story lives in fragments, in social media posts of drag performances, in the careers of the artists it launched, in the memory of a pink door under a rainbow flag that declared: this is where we belong. When FBDC announced the Fort Strip would close, Nectar would be its final chapter. Our attempts to interview the people behind the club were met with a characteristically unique response. A polite email and apology explaining the owner was off-grid, hiking the Appalachian Trail. They declined interviews and photo use, preferring to focus on Nectar’s next iteration.
The Next Frontier
It’s a curious thing about places where we dream after dark. They shape not only our nights but the very identity of our cities. In the Fort’s evolution from military base to Manila’s nocturnal frontier, we can trace our own transformation. Each incarnation—from Fat Willy’s wild west saloon energy to Embassy’s cosmopolitan ambitions to Nectar’s bold inclusivity—reflected what the city was ready to become.
Even now the Strip refuses to become a monument of nostalgia. Like any good nightspot, it knew when to turn on the lights and send everyone home to dream of what’s next. Perhaps it’s fitting that its last steward would venture into America’s original frontier, not as conquered territory, but as a landscape of possibility. Where others once came to claim, they went simply to explore, embodying how Filipinos transformed this former colonial space into a launching pad for their own adventures.
The Fort Strip’s greatest legacy might be teaching a generation of Filipinos that development isn’t just measured in property values, but in how freely a city can dream. BGC has grown up now, its gleaming towers no longer need this testing ground. But in those faded buildings dwarfed by progress, we found that rare thing, a place where each night, we could rehearse what we might become in the light of day.
This article was originally published in our April 2025 issue.
