Burgos Street in Bacolod was once known as Millionaires' Row, a short stretch of road lined with the grand houses of the province's wealthiest and most influential families. The Ramos house was considered one of the most prominent among them, and the man who built it was no ordinary resident. Don Mariano Ramos was the first Presidente Municipal -- the equivalent of mayor -- of Bacolod City. His appointment gave him both political standing and social prominence, and the house he commissioned in 1935 was designed to reflect both. Architect Mendoza of Manila blended Castilian and Tuscan architectural elements across three stories, including a rounded balcony at the rear adjacent to the master bedroom. The octagonal tower rising above the roofline was the building's signature, a feature that gave the Ramos family an unobstructed panorama of the flat coastal city spreading toward the Guimaras Strait.

On May 21, 1942, Japanese forces under Lieutenant General Takeshi Kono of the 77th Infantry Brigade, 102nd Division, occupied Bacolod. The Ramos house, with its commanding tower and central location, was seized as a watchtower and command post. The family was forced to retreat to the nearby municipality of Murcia, where they waited out the war years. The Ramos home was not the only grand house taken on Burgos Street -- the nearby Daku Balay of Don Generoso Villanueva served as the primary Japanese headquarters for Negros and the Central Visayas. But the octagonal tower of the Ramos house gave the occupiers something no other building in the city could: an unobstructed 360-degree view of approaches by land and sea. When joint Filipino and American forces liberated Bacolod on May 29, 1945, the retreating Japanese spared the Ramos house from destruction.

The connection between Don Mariano Ramos and Manuel L. Quezon was not political theater. They had been classmates, and Quezon visited the Burgos Street house as a personal friend, not merely as the Commonwealth president making an official appearance. The parties that Ramos hosted were markers of a particular era in Bacolod society, when sugar wealth was at its peak and the provincial capital functioned as a kind of tropical court. The fleet of twenty or more cars, each with its own chauffeur, was not mere extravagance -- it was the infrastructure of a host who entertained both local elites and national government officials with equal generosity. Quezon himself had appointed Alfredo Montelibano Sr. as Bacolod's first city mayor in 1938 when the municipality was elevated to city status, making the relationship between the national government and the Bacolod sugar aristocracy intimate and personal.

Today, the Mariano Ramos Ancestral House remains in family hands, cherished by the descendants of Don Mariano's eldest son, the late Dr. Romulo V. Ramos. Burgos Street has changed around it. The Millionaires' Row designation belongs to memory now, though several grand houses still punctuate the street, testifying to an era when sugar was king and Bacolod's elite built their homes to last. The octagonal tower still rises above the roofline, offering the same panoramic view it provided to Don Mariano, to the Japanese officers who commandeered it, and to anyone today who climbs its stairs. The house stands as both a family heirloom and a piece of Bacolod's civic architecture -- built by the city's first mayor, visited by a president, occupied by an invading army, and returned, at last, to the family that built it.