section_path: Cityscape/Master Plans
section_name: Master Plans
paragraph_text: Master Plans
  
  In 1938, President Manuel L. Quezon made a decision to push for a new capital city. Manila was getting crowded, and his military advisors reportedly told him that Manila, being by the bay, was an easy target for bombing by naval guns in case of attack. The new city will be located at least 15 km (9 mi) away from Manila Bay, which is beyond the reach of naval guns. Quezon contacted William E. Parsons, an American architect and planner, who had been the consulting architect for the islands early in the American colonial period. Parsons came over in the summer of 1939 and helped select the Diliman (Tuason) estate as the site for the new city. He died later that year, leaving his partner Harry Frost to take over. Frost collaborated with Juan Arellano, engineer A.D. Williams, and landscape architect and planner Louis Croft to craft a grand master plan for the new capital. The plan was approved by the Philippine authorities in 1941.
  
  The core of the new city was to be a 400-hectare (990-acre) Central Park, about the size of New York's Central Park, and defined by the North, South (Timog), East and West Avenues. On one corner of the proposed Diliman Quadrangle was delineated a 25-hectare (62-acre) elliptical site, the focal point of the grand quadrangle. This was the planned location of a large Capitol Building to house the Philippine Legislature and ancillary structures for the offices of representatives. On either side of the giant ellipse were supposed to have been the new Malacañang Palace on North Avenue (site of the present-day Veterans Memorial Hospital), and the Supreme Court Complex along East Avenue (now the site of East Avenue Medical Center). The three branches of government were to be finally and efficiently located in close proximity to each other.