Old Jatinegara market left in neglect

Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Mester market cannot be found on any Jakarta map.

But ask Jakarta's senior citizens, and they will show you exactly where it is. And you will soon realize that it is none other than the Jatinegara market.

"The name of Mester stems from Mesteer Cornelis, a schoolteacher who bought a vast tract of land along the Ciliwung riverbanks," said Tjang Kang Ju, a 60-year-old resident of Rawa Bunga residential complex, or Rawa Bangke, which is located no more than 300 meters away from Mester market.

He is one of a few people who can tell a version of the tale as written by J.J. De Vries.

Vries writes that Mesteer Cornelis Senen, the teacher's full name, was an Indonesian from the island of Banda who came to Java in 1661.

He was popular as teacher -- or meester in Dutch -- instead of his Indonesian name, Senen. The area around the Ciliwung riverbanks was even called Mesteer Cornelis for a time.

Most of the elderly will likely despair from seeing the messy and shabby scene of the Jatinegara old town which once become one of "the beautiful places" in Jakarta.

"The access streets to Mester market are smooth, wide and alongside the streets were shophouses which had arranged in perfect order," said Kang San, 50, owner of Sabar Menanti cloth shop near to the Mester market's front gate.

Kang San recalled that, in his childhood, Mester market comprised more than 100 stalls belonging to traditional vendors with iron-sheeted roofs.

The market was once located in the heart of the old shophouse buildings which mostly belonged to residents of Chinese descent.

Kang inherited his father's cloth business in 1971, when the market was renovated for the first time by Governor Ali Sadikin.

The traditional market was turned into a modern building with two of its first stories meant for kiosks, while the third story, for a movie theater, popularly known as Kencana theater.

At that time, there were about 1,300 traditional vendors renting 2,270 kiosks at the market building located in a 9,200- square-meter area.

In 1990, however, the market building burned to the ground by a "mysterious" blaze after firefighters arrived too late to extinguish the fire. The report says that around 2,000 vendors lost their merchandise to the flames.

Governor Wiyogo Atmodarminto later rebuilt the market in a Rp 27.5 billion construction project.

The recent five-story Mester market building was occupied by 2,411 kiosks.

Mester market, or Grote Passer (Great Market) on the old map, was one of the three major markets in the municipality of Batavia, along with Tanah Abang and Pasar Senen, both in Central Jakarta.

Tri Mulyatno, 64, a noodle and meatball soup monger in Jatinegara market said that as a big market in Jakarta, it has become distribution gateway for agricultural crops from higher ground in Karawang, Bekasi, Bogor, Cianjur and other cities in Eastern Jakarta.

Similar to Kang, Tri recalled her nostalgic memory that the streets inside the market were wide and smooth while, outside, people could take a ride of electric streetcars whose tracks linked Mester market to Kota in Central Jakarta, and many other places.

"I used to travel around the city with the cheap and slow- moving streetcar," she said.

With more traders entering the market, however, it became more crowded, with thousands of hawkers spilling onto the streets.

Many segments of the paths inside the market are damaged with holes from when rains come, some of them are drenched with murky, smelly rainwater, while most old shophouses appear older in appalling conditions with blotchy colors and cracked roofs and glass windows.

"Mester market is now like an old lady who becomes dirty and shabby as it is neglected," said Tri, who has run her business for 25 years.

PD Pasar Jaya, the city company tasked with maintaining the market should be responsible to repairing the damages, Tri said.

Meanwhile, Pasar Jaya spokesperson Ivo Edwin Haryanto said that the responsibility of his company was limited in the maintenance of the building and open grounds inside the fences.

The damaged streets inside the market could not be repaired immediately, meanwhile.

"Pasar Jaya operates 151 traditional markets in Jakarta; about 55 percent of our markets are old," he said. "They continue to eat up our revenue for their maintenance so that we must manage our cash flow deliberately to keep the business healthy and profitable."