Indonesia Travel: Braga Street entertainment centre, Bandung

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• published: 21 Jan 2015
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Indonesia Travel: Braga Street entertainment centre, Bandung [004] Bandung JALAN BRAGA Subscribe link ： http://bit.ly/1y8kAQv Braga Street (official name in Indonesian: Jalan Braga) is a small street in the center of Bandung, Indonesia, which was famous in the 1920s as a promenade street. Chic cafes, boutiques and restaurants with European ambiance along the street had made the city to attain the Paris of Java nickname. The street starts from a T-junction with the Asia-Afrika Street to the north until the city council, which was formerly a coffee warehouse. The first name of the street was Karreweg. The city residents dubbed it Pedatiweg, from the Indonesian language of horse-drawn carriages, because it was a narrow street (about 10 m or 30 feet wide) those only carriages could pass through. The street was built only to connect the major Great Post Road with a coffee warehouse, owned by a Dutch coffee plantation owner Andries de Wilde. In 1856, when Bandung was the capital of Priangan Regency, some colonial houses were built along the dirt road of Braga Street with their houses thatched with reeds, alang-alang grass or other straw materials. In 1882, a theater group established itself at the south part of the street and the Toneel Braga, the name of the drama group, became famous. Residents flocked into the street to watch the group's performance every night and therefore the road was improved by stone pavements, and oil lamps were installed. The street was at that time popularly known as the Braga street. In the early twentieth century, the street was the most important European shopping street in the Dutch Indies. Several well-known Western companies opened their stores in the street, including Chrysler, Plymouth and Renault car distributors. Colonial bookstores, watches and jeweleries retailers and boutique shops were common in the street for the high society. Starting from the south entrance, the Gedung Merdeka stands at the corner, known as the venue of the 1955 Asian–African Conference. Built in 1895 as a clubhouse for the wealthy, the building was first named as the Concordia Society. The building was renovated twice in 1920 and 1928, the last of which was designed by two Dutch architects, Van Galen Last and C. P. Wolff Schoemaker. It is now used as a museum of the conference. At the southeast corner of the cross-section between the Naripan Street, an eight-stories building is noticeable for its distinctive oceanwave style. Designed by Dutch architect A.F. Aalbers in 1936, the radical modern architecture building was used for the DENIS bank. Aalbers applied the Amsterdam School architectural style with its strong expressionism dialect, shown by the rounded curves along the horizontal side and one vertical facade in the middle, but he put also the modernist architecture for the interior design. The building is still used as the headquarters of a regional bank, the Bank Jabar.