Hwanghak-dong Project

The Hwanghak Neighborhood of Seoul
: Its Origins, Heyday, and Decline

text by the editorial staff of Craft and Culture
data research by Shin Kyu-chang, Kim Ju-kyum, Kim Joon-sung, Yoon Sa-bi

The area of Hwanghak (called ¡°Hwanghak-dong, where ¡°dong" indicates the area), in Seoul, evokes different things for different people. For some, it is a marketplace for fruits and vegetables; for others, it is a black market; for still others, it is a flea market. Some go there to buy third-rate pornographic videos; others go there to find decorations for their bars; still others go there to buy aphrodisiacs. Hwanghak-dong is even a mecca for music lovers in search of old LPs. Since Korea was colonized by Japan in 1910, Hwanghak-dong has changed its identity many times. Now the neighborhood is the most dramatic example of the extreme modernization process that has been occurring in Seoul since the government of Park Chung-hee and of the tragedy of unbridled urbanization. With the planned complete makeover of the neighborhood, has Hwanghak-dong reached the end of its long string of amazing transformations?

The Neighborhood

Hwanghak-dong's character is partially defined by the March First elevated Highway (named after the 1919 uprising against the Japanese occupation) that runs across the edge of it and follows the former Cheongae Rivulet and partially defined by the bland international-style buildings that surround it and that were built during the Park Chung-hee government. Although it sits among these sorry modernizations, its particularity is to remain culturally isolated from them, like a ghetto. Most people think of Hwanghak-dong as a marketplace that follows the former Cheongae Rivulet, not as an independent administrative entity. What follows is a look at Hwanghak-dong as it really was, is, and soon will no longer be.
The east side of Hwanghak-dong abuts Shinsul-dong where a police station used to be located, just like in other neighborhoods. The station is gone now, but its psychological presence remains powerful as a separation point between the residential quarter and the former brothel quarter. The west side borders the distinctive walls of the grounds of Sung-dong Technical High School, which is located in the Dongdaemun neighborhood. Its north side is cut off by Cheongae Highway and, interestingly enough, is watched over by the ¡°Dongmyo" or ¡°East Tumulus" honoring the historic third-century Chinese warrior hero Gwanwoo. Little by little the market has approached, confronted, and overtaken the hero. The south side of the marketplace is peopled by low-cost derelict housing that extends all the way to the Shindang neighborhood.

The Cheongae Rivulet

To understand Hwanghak-dong one must first appreciate the traditional and symbolic attachment of many people in Seoul to the Cheongae Rivulet that once ran for almost four kilometers through Seoul, separating the districts of Jongno-gu and Jung-gu. The Cheongae Rivulet itself was located at the confluence of three other rivulets, which flowed down from three mountains in Seoul: Bukak, Inwang, and Nam. The Cheongae Rivulet continued eastward to join the Jungrang Rivulet where Hanyang University is now located, which in turn flowed into the Hanchun Rivulet, and then down into the great Han River that cuts through the heart of Seoul today. Between 1955 and 1970, successive municipal governments undertook to cover the Cheongae Rivulet all the way up to the Majang neighborhood of Seoul, and to run an elevated highway (supposedly modeled after the German autobahn) over its former emplacement.

The original name of the Cheongae neighborhood, where the rivulet ran, was Cheongpungae, but people have always called it Gaechun, which means the Rivulet. Historically, the Cheongae Rivulet was terribly polluted from its use as a sewage conduit, and during the rainy season it overflowed and flooded the entire neighborhood. As early as the the beginning of the fifteenth century, the third king of the Chosun Dynasty, Taejong, ordered the regularization of the Cheongae Rivulet. Then, in the seventeenth century, the twenty-first king, Youngjo, ordered workers to dredge it, to construct stone embankments along it, and to regularize its depth. Dredging continued under Kings Soonjo, in the first half of the eighteenth century, and King Gojong, in the second half. It was under the Japanese occupation (1910-1945), when Seoul began to take on certain appearances of a Westernized city, that the stream became known as the Cheongae Rivulet. When Korea was finally liberated from Japan at the end of the Second World War, the government invested imported sums in the ongoing management of the Cheongae Rivulet.
The Yongdo Bridge was built over the rivulet at the beginning of the Chosun Dynasty (thirteenth century), and immediately struck everyone with its presence. Formerly known as either Yongdo Bridge or Yongmi Bridge, it became the obligatory connection between the neighborhoods of Dongdaemun and Wangshimni. The affluent residents on the north side of the bridge -- the north side of every waterway in Korea being where the affluent classes traditionally took up residence -- claim that the water of the Cheongae Rivulet was clean before the outbreak of the Korean War. This might be because they lived upstream, where water usually is cleaner than downstream. It's more probable that the Cheongae Rivulet was already polluted during the Japanese occupation, when many poor Koreans moved to the area in and around Wangshimni. This also might be the reason why kids from elsewhere called the kids of Wangshimni [tongpari], or ¡°dirty flies." In fact, today, there is a well-known bar in Wangshimni called the ¡°Libaton Hoff," which, for Koreans, at least, has a certain French ring to it, but on further study, turns out to be [tongpari] with its syllables arranged backwards. Documents from the period indicate that already during the Chosun Dynasty, the salubrity of the rivulet was questionable. It is reported that once during the rainy season, when the rivulet overflowed, the headless skeleton of a vagrant washed up from under the Yongdo Bridge. Another document describes the unspeakable stench of decapitated and decomposing bodies of Catholics that the government had executed and thrown into the rivulet. This was long ago.

Park Chung-hee's Modernization Plan

After the liberation from the Japanese, Hwanghak-dong's reach became more and more extended. Tramways constructed during the occupation now shuttled fresh produce and heating wood from the Tuksum area of Seoul to Wangshimni. This led to the opening, in 1946, of Seong-dong Market, situated in the southwest of Hwanghak-dong. Today it is called Jungang Market and is one of the three principal markets that feed the people of Seoul. The entire area of Wangshimni, including Hwanghak-dong, changed again in 1950, date of the beginning of the Korean War. War-damaged houses were quickly rebuilt under the direction of the army. Around the Cheongae Rivulet, wooden shacks sprouted up and their poor inhabitants opened a secondhand marketplace and a black market for American goods that grew and transformed the area. Prostitutes took to the neighborhood.

In 1961, Park Chung-hee took power with a coup d'etat. In 1963, he proclaimed himself president and set out on an ambitious if oftentimes misguided modernization plan for the country, including the rapid and total urbanization of Seoul, with the assistance of engineers and architects who had studied in the West. Three elements of the plan for the urbanization of Seoul were to cover up the Cheongae Rivulet, to construct an elevated highway, and to build apartment complexes. In 1955, work began on the Cheongae Rivulet in conjunction with the highway that would be built above it. Little did anyone know that it would take fifteen years of work before the Cheongae Rivulet would be fully covered in Hwanghak-dong. The tramway and the Yongdo Bridge continued to function until 1958. The construction of the elevated March First Highway began in August 1967 and was completed at the end of March 1969. It cost 1.53 billion Won (around $1.25 million today), four hundred million Won of which were borrowed from foreign banks.

In 1976, the highway's four-lane extension to the Majang area of Seoul was completed. As it stands todays, the highway is almost six kilometers long. The ostensible purpose of the March First Highway was and still is to facilitate traffic circulation. In reality, however, Park Chung-hee's ambition was to revitalize the Jongno and Bukchon areas of Seoul, which,
since the Japanese occupation, had fallen out of favor compared to the commercial power of Euljiro and Namchon. This meant that the wooden shacks and the brothels established around the Cheongae Rivulet, in areas such as Jongsam, had to go.

The key player in the development of the Cheongae Rivulet and Jongsam was the mayor of Seoul, Kim Hyun-ok (1926-1997), who, in compensation for his trouble, was nicknamed the Human Bulldozer. He was at the helm of the violent evictions of residents and prostitutes, which he carried out with the organization and secrecy of a military operation. Under the code name ¡°Operation Butterfly," from September 26 to October 5, 1968, he ¡°transferred" prostitutes and their handlers to the now infamous ¡°588" and ¡°Mi-ari Texas" neighborhoods of Chungryangli, an area of Seoul that, at the time, seemed far enough away from the center of the city so as not to attract the notice of those who risked offense. The March First Highway and its ancillary March First Building, a thirty-odd story bland international style office building that still stands today, and the then mayor of Seoul's creation of ¡°Texas Mi-ari," mecca of Korean prostitution remain as poorly aging symbols of the Park Chung-hee modernization plan.

Since the liberation from Japan, the most pressing problem in the country was housing. In response, the government decided to evict forcibly the inhabitants of the one hundred and thirty-eight thousand illegally constructed habitations counted in Seoul up till 1967, to demolish the makeshift habitations, and to build low-cost housing in their place. To the evicted, the government decided to give eight [pyung] (around twenty-five square meters) of land outside the city on which they could build -- again illegally -- new homes for themselves. It was up to the evicted to find the means to build their own houses, streets, and sewage system. This forced exodus led to the creation of the neighborhoods of Sadang, Dobong, Yumchang, Geuyeu, Ha-il, Shiheung, Bongchun, Shinlim, Chan, Sangmoon, Sanggue, and Junggue. In the end, for the government to develop certain areas in what was then the center of Seoul, it had to support the underdevelop of other areas outside the center.

The most famous case of forced evictions from the center of Seoul with resettlements to the outskirts occurred in the Gwangju area, which is situated in the vast belt surrounding Seoul called Gyeongi. In 1969, the city of Seoul forced one million two hundred and twenty-seven thousand residents living illegally in two hundred and thirty thousand apartments in the Yongdoo and Majang neighborhoods, and around the Cheongae Rivulet to climb aboard military trucks and be transported to the Gwangju hillside, two hours away from the city, a place having neither water, nor electricity, nor telephone, nor sewage system. A bus service ran once every two hours between Seoul and Gwangju. With neither homes nor jobs, the refugees from the city were hard pressed to feed themselves. The most horrible stories circulated about the living conditions, including one about a mother who, having just given birth, boiled and consumed her newborn child.

In 1971, the anger and bitterness of the residents of Gwangju came to a
head and they rose up in what is now called the insurrection of August 10. Heeding their anger, Mayor Kim undertook the construction of four- and five-story low-cost housing units in the center of the city, where evicted residents could be relocated. This solution responded to the need for evicted people to be closer to their jobs and less traumatized by the loss of their homes. By the end of 1969, over four hundred apartment buildings had been built. Then, on April 8, 1970, at 6:30 a.m., tragedy truck. A low-cost apartment building with the unfortunate name of ¡°Wow" collapsed, killing thirty-three people and injuring forty more. Shortly thereafter, Mayor Kim was impeached, and the construction of low-cost housing stopped.

Were there any voices against this shoddy urbanization? Because of the military dictatorship, dissent was almost impossible. One notable exception, however, was an article written on August 12, 1967, in the Seoul newspaper Donga, by a former director of Seoul City Planning, a certain Han Jung-sup, who had the courage to come out against the construction of the March First Highway and the redevelopment of the area in and around the Cheongae Rivulet.

Criticism and Fragments

¡°The project to construct a highway through the center of Seoul is based on a misreading of the traffic congestion. If the problem is rush hour traffic, the solution is not to facilitate the circulation of cars, but to develop and encourage public transportation. There are under thirty thousand cars in and around Seoul, an insufficient number that doesn't justify the highway's construction costs. It's also a shame that a highway will destroy the beauty of the city center."

A few days later, on August 15, 1967, a second and more audacious article by the same Han Jung-sup appeared in the newspaper Donga.

¡°To design an oval highway in a round city goes against the common sense of city highways. It's an invitation for cars that have nothing to do with the center of the city to remain there and to create unnecessary traffic. Not to mention that the traffic congestion does nothing to help the beauty of the city. To build a highway in Cheongyechun is also to encourage the misuse of the surrounding area, which is already given over to commerce. It will demand an enormous investment without solving the essential traffic problems. The design is inappropriate and insensitive to the beauty of the city."

Han's audacity was, of course, to no avail, and the highway was built. Rumors circulated that the real reason why the March First Highway was built was so that Park Chung-hee and his entourage could drive rapidly from the Blue House (the presidential residence in Seoul) to the new Walkerhill Hotel, which was built in 1963, and where the dictator enjoyed having parties. Or that the low-cost housing projects built around the highway served to block foreign visitors' views of slums. Or that the highway was built so shoddily that it might one day collapse. Or that the Cheongae Rivulet that was in the process of being covered might explode one day because of trapped gas under its concrete slab. Even today, over thirty years later, no one knows for sure what the truth is surrounding the construction of the March First Highway. Admittedly, the highway and the buildings around it had the positive effect of presenting a city and, by extension, a country in the process of modernization to foreign politicians and VIPs who stayed in the Walkerhill Hotel, all of which led to foreign investment. The questions remains, however, whether modernization means the destruction of the order of the traditional city.

The Flowering and Fall of the Antique Shops

For Koreans who lived through the period, Park Chung-hee's Third Republic will also be remembered for its Saemaeul Movement, whose stated goal, in rhetoric and even musical lyrics, was the frank destruction of the traditional Korean village and its traditional lifestyle, including all the objects and tools that it created and that created it. It was left to astute entrepreneurs to create a new market for these objects and tools by selling them to affluent city dwellers who were suddenly nostalgic for a past that they had partially willed. Hair buyers and sellers (there were many at the time; they bought and sold human hair to make wigs.), who were particularly numerous in Hwanghak-dong, loaded trucks with newly molded plastic goods and drove to their hometowns, where they exchanged the plastic for the villagers' ¡°antiques." What was in the village an everyday object became in Seoul a traditional antique. This was the beginning of the flea market boutiques in Seoul, which were essentially different from the traditional antique shops in Insa-dong that sold real antiques. The Ministry of Culture officially approved of the extension of the flea market. At its height, there were between two hundred and two hundred and fifty antique shops in Hwanghak-dong. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, in preparation for the Seoul Olympics, the government suddenly withdrew its support for the entire neighborhood of antique shops because of its supposed unsightliness, and order it to be transferred from Hwanghak-dong to Janganpyung, which was further from the center of the city, where there would be no risk of having Western visitors see it. Today, with the entire Hwanghak neighborhood in decline, there remain only thirteen antique sellers. (In this same issue, see ¡°The Story of Kim Gwang-ja's Antique Shop," in which the conditions of the transfer and the advent of secondhand shops selling watches, motors, and power tools are described.)

In 1987, the Majang Highway, which crossed Hwanghak-dong from east to west, was opened, splitting in two the secondhand marketplace and Jungang Market. Since then, Hwanghak-dong has become primarily a center for secondhand goods and rebuilt appliances sold at reasonable prices. (The stores begin at no. 13 Hwanghak-dong.) When the 1997 economic crisis hit the country, Koreans were forced to tighten their belts, and the market for Hwanghak-dong secondhand goods thrived. It seems that some of the entrepreneurs even began to export their goods. For a while, the flea market was just as important as the market for second-hand appliances. The government's redevelopment plan for the area became an immediate threat to the markets.

The Nineteen-nineties

By the end of the nineteen-nineties, there were so many stores selling second-hand goods that to mention Hwanghak-dong was to evoke a flea market. Thanks to this context, ¡°the Hwanghak-dong strollers" appeared, an expression created by the Hwanghak-dong Project that set out to document the transformations in the neighborhood. The Hwanghak-dong Project defined the stroller as a spectator of the city, ambling about with no precise destination in mind, someone who the modernists claim invented the modern aesthetic itself. It was during this last period that the ¡°Hwanghak-dong flaneur" appeared, a type of person, primarily men of a certain age and modest social standing who lived in Gangbuk, or the north side of the Han River, which cuts through Seoul like the Seine cuts through Paris. Gangnam, the south side of the Han River, is the new and richer half of the city. To those who are unfamiliar with this type of stroller, I recommend a look at the painting ¡°Un Apres-Midi a l'Ile de La Grande Jatte," by the French artist Georges Seurat. The Hwanghak-dong strollers appeared spontaneously and seemed to be looking for the objects and the aura of a bourgeois standing that, at the end of the twentieth century, they were losing to the advent of a new century and a new age. They took solace in the visual and tactile appreciation of the quotidian objects of their recent and not-so-recent past, and considered it all in the context of the painful memories of the Korean War and the spectacular industrialization of the country. The strollers were immediately visible by their slow gait, their weathered appearance, and their searching, questioning look.

At the end of the nineteen-seventies and beginning of the nineteen-eighties, Hwanghak-dong wasn't yet a slum area. Toward the end of the nineteen-eighties, however, it degenerated rapidly into a slum. One of the particular signs of this downward spiral was its transformation into a cultural ghetto, not because of its isolation from the current period of what some theoreticians of class society call reflexive modernization, but because of its inability to build on the period of reflection and information. Today, theoreticians of reflexive modernization pretend that the death of structured capitalism encourages a thoughtful working class. To them, the class of thoughtful workers follows three paths: 1) that of consumers who are isolated from one another; 2) that of users of information technology; and 3) that of producers of products that compose the cutting edge of information technology. By succeeding in maintaining a link to existing professional networks, they form a new concept of the middle class.
On the other hand, although the structures and values of the industrial society are collapsing, when it comes to traditional poverty, since the poor will never be invited to be a part of the information technology network, they will be reformed into a new subcategory, which is a new form of isolation and discrimination.

Losers to Reflexive Modernization

According to the sociologist Scott Lash, minority groups that live in traditional poverty in the Western world are forced to imitate the lives of the affluent majority and their social system. But today's poor, of which capitalistic structures had predicted the imminent disappearance, don't imitate the social order and systems of the majority. What has happened, is that the majority's social systems have decided to eliminate the poor's neighborhoods. Many official economic structures are disappearing in poor neighborhoods, such as the labor market. Under the attractive banner of postmodernism, reevaluation of these structures is occurring in welfare states, and the administration of impoverished neighborhoods is being abandoned. The number of poor people in a given impoverished neighborhood is diminishing, but only because they are now mobile, moving from poor neighborhood to poor neighborhood, which suits the redevelopment model of the majority. Hwanghak-dong is a good example of this reflexive modernization.
In the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, before Hwanghak-dong was a flea market it was a large concentration of small clothing factories. But as other countries' labor forces remained cheap, Korea's skyrocketed, forcing manufacturers to export labor and close factories. An entire labor force, primarily female, became unemployed. Today, in the teeming clothing market of Dongdaemun, which is near Hwanghak-dong, most of the labor is done elsewhere, not in the neighborhood. The underlying cause of the decline of Hwanghak-dong is the growing underclass that cannot catch up with the middle-class majority, which, in recent years, has moved from Gangbuk -- the north side of the Han River, where Hwanghak-dong is located -- to Gangnam, the south side of the river, which is now the more vital economic half of Seoul. The proximity of the middle-class to the poor who lived in Hwanghak-dong and elsewhere in Gangbuk was like a bridge to a better way of life. But the economic and real estate boom in Gangnam changed all of that.
Now the striking differences between middle class and underclass have become stunningly visible, as the middle classes have moved into high-rise apartment buildings across the river, leaving the poor on the ground level, in shacks and run-down traditional houses. One symbol of the growing isolation of poor Gangbuk neighborhoods like Hwanghak-dong is the closing of evening adult-education classes for lack of teachers. Now that the educated class is across the river in Gangnam, it doesn't make the effort to go back across the bridge to maintain contact with old Seoul.
The poverty of Hwanghak-dong is also reflected in the loss of its last antique shops to the Janganpyung area of Seoul, leaving but the sellers who cannot afford to move out of the area. Since daily life in Seoul is now dictated by the car, it's no problem for the affluent to go a little further to find work and play, including buying antiques. For the poor, not having a car symbolizes all that separates them from the affluent when it comes to finding a job in a city as vast as Seoul has become. And now, on top of their lack of mobility, the poor in places like Hwanghak-dong must compete with the slight but visibly growing group of Southeast Asian immigrants who are ready to work for less. Hwanghak-dong has never looked worse. Municipal services are rare. For the dense population of working couples in the neighborhood, there are only three day care centers.

Redevelopment

In 1985, the government targeted Hwanghak-dong as a redevelopment area. Yet nothing happened for years. Then, in 1996, a revised plan expanded the area of redevelopment and the construction group Donga was named to demolish and rebuild the area during a five year period ending in 2001. In the meantime, Donga Construction went bankrupt and disputes between the government and residents slowed the construction site. In 1999, the plan took off again with the naming of Lotte Construction as the new builder. Demolition of the neighborhood began in earnest, in November 2001, but the remaining six hundred and sixty families of the neighborhood, all of whom live in the March First Apartment Complex, a series of low-cost and dangerously dilapidated buildings, have continued to fight for a more equitable solution to their future housing needs. The Lotte Construction Company plan is to build the ¡°Sungin-dong Lotte Castle, Sky, Earth, and Man" (sic) by July 2004, which, in plain English, would be three apartment towers of thirty-three floors apiece, each housing two hundred and twenty families in apartments of between a hundred and a hundred and twenty square meters. Another tower would contain four hundred and nineteen studio apartments, plus parking. On August 23, 2001, the city of Seoul announced that because of its unsightliness, the March First Apartment Complex would be demolished before the start of the Korea-Japan 2002 World Cup and that its residents would be rehoused in temporary housing. In the midst of the debate, speculators have been busy buying up the hypothetical Lotte apartments to resell them, most likely to others but the residents, many of whom will never be able to afford the new housing with the thirty million Won compensation (around twenty-five thousand American dollars) that the city has offered each family. Half of the former residents of the March First Apartment Complex have taken the city's compensation and left the neighborhood. The other half remains, fighting for a more equitable settlement. The neighborhood is now like a battleground pitting the remaining residents against the city and the builder. As the situation stands, the neighborhood is destined to become another upper middle-class housing project, whose inhabitants, seeking only to make their investment grow, will surely object to the remaining traces of Hwanghak-dong as a flea market, however picturesque and original it may be. This is the same scenario that has been playing out for years throughout the traditional center of Seoul. Modernization is leaving Seoul with an alien image of itself.

Voices for the Reconstitution of the Cheongae Rivulet

In an article titled ¡°Waiting for a More Human and Nature-Oriented Seoul," which appeared in the spring 2001 issue of the magazine ¡°My Culture," the well-known architect Kim Suk-chul proposed that the Cheongae Rivulet be uncovered and allowed to flow anew through the middle of the Cheongae neighborhood, in Seoul: ¡°Traditionally, mountain wind and water are at the source of Seoul's energy. The Cheongae Rivulet is an essential element of this energy. The highway above the concrete slab that covers the rivulet is not. I'm for uncovering the rivulet and cleaning it up."
On January 1, 2002, in the Seoul newspaper Hankyoreh, the well-known writer Park Kyung-ri wrote an article titled ¡°The Life of the Cheongae Rivulet" in which she explained the importance of keeping nature in our lives and in the life of the country. Other intellectuals and academics have formed the Association for the Renaissance of the Cheongae Neighborhood" to support the demolition of the March First Highway, saying its maintenance is too costly to justify its continued service. In two symposiums held in the last two years, it proposed a comprehensive redevelopment plan for the neighborhood.
Its secretary general Noh Soo-heung, a professor of environmental studies at Yonsei University, in Seoul, set the goal of uncovering the Cheongae Rivulet by 2011, date of the six hundredth anniversary of the founding of Seoul.

The cost of such a plan would be monumental, not to mention the cooperation it would entail from the government and the residents. It seems impossible that one of Park Chung-hee's major legacies, the March First Highway and the ugly buildings around it, will ever be demolished, even if the ensemble was completely misguided from the start and is today as unsightly as the areas of Seoul it replaced or masked. Yet the center of Seoul has to become more livable, not just more modern. It is sad yet typical that the culture and character of the city is the last thing on the minds of those who have the power to change things for the better. Still, it's better to rethink Hwanghak-dong now, while some of it still remains, than to rethink it later, when it remains only in our memories.