TRAVEL
staying with friends who were studying abroad with her in Korea’s second- largest city, Pusan. Since just after the war, Itaewon had been notorious as the playground of American G.I.’s: Its most prominent landmark was a slope called Hooker Hill, a steep set of alleys that house bars where scantily clad Korean bar girls call out in heavily accented English after foreign men strolling by. Another notable feature of Itaewon during my last visit was its immigrant population, mostly Africans, assumed in local popular lore to be undocumented and engaging in all kinds of questionable activities. That was six years ago. On this trip to Seoul, when I reach out to a Korean film director, he suggested we meet at a nighttime art performance in the back alleys of Itaewon. I find the neighborhood transformed. Somehow this once-sordid place has become one of the hippest addresses in Seoul, housing cafés and cocktail bars, architecture and design firms, not to mention a top private museum: Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art. The audience at the art performance is a combination of foreigners and locals, many of whom have been educated abroad. Another film director I meet there had recently returned from studying in the United States. “This neighborhood is an easier place to adjust to after being abroad,” he tells me. “There are foreign bars and restaurants, foreign people, and that makes it an attractive place to live for returnees like me.” Minsuk Cho, the architect, recently designed a new building near the Leeum museum complex in Itaewon, which he also calls home. “I’ve worked all over the world,” says Cho. “But there’s something different, something special, about designing a building just
I get a variety of responses: People work so hard that when they get home they just want to play, get drunk, decompress. Apartments are so small that you have to go out to enjoy yourself. Koreans are by nature communal and therefore most comfortable in a large group of friends. None of these answers completely satisfies me. But as I catch a cab home from Dongdaemun, I realize that as important as it is for urban planners elsewhere to learn from Seoul, what they On this trip to Seoul, when I reached out to a Korean film director, he suggested we meet at a nighttime art performance in the back alleys of Itaewon. I find the neighborhood transformed. cannot do is plan for the unplanned—the utterly human things that set a city apart. For some inexplicable reason what’s emerged organically in Seoul is that its residents are ready to live by night. HOME AGAIN The last time I visited the Seoul neighborhood of Itaewon it was to tell a tragic tale: I was producing a TV documentary about the murder of a young American student named Jamie Penich who’d been killed in a seedy motel in Itaewon where she’d been
A block north of the design plaza site I find another rediscovered part of the city’s landscape: the Cheonggyecheon River, long buried under roadways and buildings, and unearthed in 2005 to create a recreational area slicing two miles through the center of town. Sidewalks and the river lie nearly 20 feet below ground level in a landscaped concrete canyon. This new Cheonggyecheon is a man-made sanctuary of flowing water teeming with fish and plants, insulated from the noise, heat and chaos above. This river is, to me, an even more radical, transformative and spectacular project than the city’s many brand-new, larger-scale structures. I follow Can’s instructions and return that evening to find what must be one of the world’s most intense night markets, consisting not just of thousands of street vendors, but also of multiple high-rise shopping malls, filled with fashions of all kinds. Selling starts at midnight, when the vendors roll in to pitch their tents, and lasts until 5 or 6 a.m. All of this points to an interesting dimension of Seoul life that doesn’t exist just in Dongdaemun: What most distinguishes this city is not its grand high-rises, its elaborate transportation system or the careful urban strategizing of its city planners, but the intense 24-hour activity that no one planned: the all-night shopping malls of Dongdaemun; the ornate, multistory jjimjilbang spas with dozens of different pools and saunas that pump all day and night; and the fried-chicken joints packed until 5 every morning. For this native New Yorker, a night out in Seoul made me think, forget NYC, Seoul is the city that never sleeps. When I ask Seoul residents why this unique culture has developed here,
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EC Magazines | Summer Edition 2022
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