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Last Poor Hillside Village in Seoul, Baeksa
Baeksa Village in Seoul is located at 104, Jungae-dong, Nowon-gu. It is a strange space at the foot of Bulam Mountain, not far from the school district. It is called Baeksa Village after Address.
I came here by chance. I had always been interested in pre-developed urban spaces such as Guryong Village and Hongje Village, but I didn’t dare to visit them because I was uncomfortable with invading someone’s living space for my own curiosity.
If a place is developed as a tourist destination, my visit might be beneficial to the residents’ lives. However, I felt that it would be tantamount to violence to point a camera at them or make them the subject of a story just because their lives are a little mundane.
On this day, I happened to be in the neighborhood for my child’s climbing experience, and my wife told me that there was a village to walk around, so I vaguely visited Baeksa Village. As it is a village, there is no place to park. There are vacant lots everywhere, so parking is not difficult, but you need to be careful when driving because there are many narrow alleys.
The past of Baeksan Village
The last poor hillside village of Seoul is in the shadow of South Korea’s development history. There are many layers of forced displacement, marginalization, and skyrocketing real estate development.
According to my research after my return, the government forcibly relocated more than 1,100 people from shanty towns in Yongsan, Cheonggyecheon, and Anam-dong to the foot of Mount Bulam in 1967. The reason given was to improve the city center.
According to the Kyunghyang Newspaper at the time, there were many conflicts. In 1968, there was a report that the government sent the migrants to a land that had been licensed to an early childhood education institution, Eunsil Academy, and there were protests to move them to another area. Despite the conflicts, the government continued to relocate them and gave them a 30-square-meter tented house with chalk lines to house four families. Each house was about 8 square meters, about the size of a single room.
The poor conditions in the area at the time are also evident in the article. On September 24, 1969, an article from The Korea Times (p. 8) reported a cholera epidemic in the area. It is a disease that is rarely found in Korea now, but at that time, it was a devastating acute epidemic. According to the article, Baeksa Village has a population of more than 6,000 people living in more than 1,000 houses, and there is no hospital, so they buy medicine at the only pharmacy. What’s even more surprising is that there is no running water and they use seven communal wells, which have never been disinfected by the local government.
This situation seems to have been going on for quite some time. According to a 1981 article in the Dong-A Ilbo, the Seoul Metropolitan Government is finally starting to install waterworks and marketplaces. This was 15 years after the migration began. Until the 90s, flush toilets were common, but running water was rare, and people continued to draw water from wells. If you read later, it seems that it took 3-4 years to install communal waterworks instead of individual waterworks.
In a June 3, 1989 Chosun Ilbo article, a postman at the Dobong Post Office in Seoul wrote a comment requesting the maintenance of the address. It was stated that the number 104, Nowon-gu (unauthorized village), has a population of 7420 people in 1713 households, and since there is no lake designated as a single address, it is necessary to check all the tenants of multiple households to deliver letters. From this article, we can see that the population of Baeksa Village grew more and more. From the initial 1000 households, the number of households increased to more than 700, and the population increased to about 1500.
At that time, the population was already a large apartment complex, with 4.33 people per household. If we go back to our previous article about 4 families living in a house, that’s 17 people living in a space of 30 square meters.
At that time, the population was already a large apartment complex, with 4.33 people per household. If we go back to our previous article about 4 families living in a house, that’s 17 people living in a space of 30 square meters.
Baeksa Village has been the subject of many media and documentaries because of its symbolism as the last moonlight neighborhood in Seoul. The people who appear in the film are long-time residents, mostly old women with gray hair. Their wrinkles show the hardships of the years, and you can guess their age just by looking at them now, but it would be hard to understand them.
This is an article from the Kyunghyang Newspaper in 1989, the year after Seoul, South Korea, hosted the 1988 Olympic Games.
In this article from May 2, 1989, Kang Hyojeongyang (17 years old at the time, Dobong commercial high school 3) was awarded the Seoul Youth Grand Prize on the 67th Children’s Day. She is the youngest girl living in Baeksa Village, taking care of her two sick brothers and raising a motherless family.
Her father is a street vendor who travels five days a week in the countryside, and her mother collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage in 1979 and became the head of the family when she was in the second grade of elementary school. Her mother died in 1986, and her youngest sister suffers from epilepsy. She says she used to get up at 4 a.m. to make breakfast for her sister and drive her to school. “There’s no room for despair,” she said in the interview. The story outside of this short interview is probably much longer and sadder.
Her interview ends with this
It takes courage to live, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried and wished my parents were there when I was in trouble, but that doesn’t mean I can’t live.
If you look up other interviews from the past, the road to school in this area was long and rough. You had to follow a trail and cross a mountain to get to Yeonchon Elementary School in summer. During the rainy season, the leaky houses had to be repaired and the children had to worry about being washed away. The demolitionists carved out a path on the hillside and built their own houses.
The story of the Baeksa Village bathhouse 'Vitamin Bathhouse'
The Vitamin Bath in Baeksa Village is no ordinary neighborhood bath. It measures 76 square meters (23 pyeong). It’s less than one-tenth the size of a regular public bath, but it’s the only bathing space and love room in the village, which is home to 120 families, mostly elderly people on basic welfare.
The vitamin baths are open twice a week, on Wednesdays for men and Thursdays for women. There’s no charge.
Most of the residents of Baeksa Village live in one-room shacks, so to take a bath, they boil water in a pot with briquettes in a small yard, then mix it with cold water in front of a washing machine. Not only was it difficult for many of the elderly to lift the heavy pots by themselves, but the laundry room had no door and was exposed to drafts.
In 2016, the social welfare organization Seoul Lignite Bank organized a fundraising campaign, and more than 600 people, from elementary school students to grandmothers who collected waste paper to Okinawans in Japan, contributed to the construction cost of 63 million won. It opened in November 2016.
People wary of strangers
There are still some elderly people living in the village. The houses built 40 years ago are still standing, and everything from the store at the entrance of the village to the church on the hillside looks the same. The wave of change hasn’t yet reached the village’s entrance.
At the beginning of Baeksa Village, there is a cafe. A cafe that seems a bit out of place in this neighborhood. The cafe is called Hourly, and it doubles as a workshop with the goal of being zero waste. It is described as a cafe located in the last Daldong neighborhood in Seoul. A few young people were drinking coffee inside.
A few steps from here, the atmosphere changes. A few rusted signs show the stores that once served as the town’s shopping center, but most of them are closed. There is also the filming location of Song Joong Ki’s noodle restaurant in The Youngest Son of a Chaebol. Samgeori Restaurant, which is located at the beginning of the village, is a real business, but it is not a noodle restaurant, but a place that sells snacks such as pork belly. Usually, tourist spots are built around filming locations like this, but the situation was different here as it was about to be redeveloped.
The road gradually climbs and becomes sparsely populated. You see collapsed roofs and walls, circled and crossed out in red letters. There are warning signs and police lines everywhere, and piles of burned briquettes. This is because the houses are old and there are safety concerns.
The neighborhood was once home to some factories that utilized the surrounding materials to build walls and roofs with slate, but all of them have since left after the IMF.
The neighborhood was once home to some factories that utilized the surrounding materials to build walls and roofs with slate, but all of them have since left after the IMF.
Local schoolchildren have transformed some of the barren landscape by painting murals, but even these are now peeling, adding to the desolation. The church, which used to be the center of the village, is now rarely visited.
The future of Baeksan Village
No. 104, which has been called Seoul’s last poor hillside village and has been exposed in various media such as dramas, is also facing redevelopment. Apartments are being pushed through, and red signs abound. Many people have left their homes, but there are still many who cannot afford to leave.
From the top of Baeksa Village, you can see Nowon-gu’s Jungang-dong. What used to be rice paddies and pear fields was completely transformed when apartments were built in the mid-90s.
There were once 1,700 families living here, but now there are less than 100. More than 90% have moved out. The receivership will be completed in June 2024, and construction will begin next August, so it’s really the end. The apartments will be built by GS construct company and will be ready for occupancy in 2027.
The story of the development is also complicated. After the development restriction zone was lifted in January 2008, the Seoul Metropolitan Government designated it as a maintenance zone and LH participated as the implementer, but it abandoned the project in 2016 due to residential preservation projects.
Seoul Housing and Land Corporation (SH) took over the project as the new implementer, and GS E&C was in charge of construction. Seoul’s plan was to build 1,900 apartments and 500 low-rise rental housing units, utilizing the existing topography of the village. However, conflicts have arisen over the high construction costs of low-rise housing.
That’s because building low-rise housing is like building a single-family house, a cottage. There are still conflicts over the cost, with the construction cost of a rental house reaching 11 million won per 3.3 square meters.
Baeksa Village was heavily promoted as Korea’s first residential conservation project. The rental housing project area, or 28% of the total land, will be redeveloped while retaining the alleyways, natural features, and residential and cultural features of the old neighborhood.
The intentions are good. During the time of Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, the city proposed some preservation projects, saying, “Baeksa Village is a museum of the history of modern life, and I don’t want it to be redeveloped in a way that pushes everything out,” and in June 2012, the rental housing complex was designated as a low-rise residential preservation area. At the time, the Seoul Metropolitan Government claimed that it had “made a new breakthrough in the 40-year history of redevelopment,” but it remains to be seen if it really is a new breakthrough.
Until recently, if you search for Baeksa Village, most of the reviews are from photographers who came to take pictures or to invest in the area. This means that many people see it as an opportunity to make money. Of course, interest in real estate is not a bad thing. But for those of us who still live here, we have to be wary.
If you happen to visit Baeksa Village, we recommend that you do so with caution.
