Itaewon

Where it sits. Itaewon is the commercial strip along Itaewon-ro in Yongsan District, stretched between Noksapyeong and Hangangjin stations on Subway Line 6, on the southern slope below Namsan. The ground falls steeply from the mountain to the Han River, so almost every side street is a ramp or a staircase, and the north side of the main road backs onto the hill while the south side drops toward Hannam-dong. The whole quarter is defined by what used to sit immediately west of it: the Yongsan garrison, a walled military city used by the Japanese army from 1904 and by United States forces from 1945 until the main relocation to Pyeongtaek in 2017 and 2018. The vacated land is being converted, slowly and contentiously, into a national park.

The story behind it. A district that spent a century next to a foreign army develops habits other neighbourhoods do not have. Itaewon grew up on tailoring, leather goods, antique furniture, imported groceries and bars, and it became the one part of Seoul where English was routinely the working language and where communities that had nowhere else went. Seoul Central Mosque, opened on the hill above Usadan-ro in 1976 as Korea's first purpose-built mosque, anchors a lane of halal butchers, Turkish and Uzbek restaurants and Arabic bookshops. A block of gay bars on one alley became, from the 1990s onward, the closest thing the country had to an open queer district. Antique dealers still occupy the western end, and a stretch of hillside above Noksapyeong known as Haebangchon, settled after liberation in 1945, has its own separate history of migration. The name Itaewon itself long predates all of this: a wŏn, one of the state-run inns that stood on the roads out of the capital, operated in this area under the Joseon dynasty, and the district has been a place where travellers stopped rather than settled for the better part of six centuries.

On screen. The 2020 JTBC drama Itaewon Class, adapted from a webtoon, made the neighbourhood a destination for viewers across Asia. Its story of an ex-convict opening a bar called DanBam and building it into a rival to a food conglomerate was shot around the real streets, with the Namsan skyline and Seoul Tower behind, though the pub itself was assembled from a shopfront for exteriors and a constructed interior. The show arrived at a difficult moment: it aired during the first year of the pandemic, when the district's bars were closing. Older screen credits run through decades of Korean film using Itaewon as shorthand for the foreign, the illicit and the in-between, a shorthand residents have long found reductive.

Gyeongnidan-gil. The steep street climbing north from Noksapyeong takes its name from the army finance corps headquarters that stood on it. From about 2013 it filled with small independent restaurants, craft beer bars and roasters, became one of the most photographed streets in the city, and then hollowed out as rents tripled and the original tenants left — a cycle so recognisable that Korean now uses the ending of its name as a generic suffix for any such strip, from Mangnidan-gil in Mapo to Hwangnidan-gil in Gyeongju. Walking it today gives a live reading of Seoul gentrification: new openings at the bottom, shuttered units in the middle, and long-established places at the top that own their buildings.

The 2022 crowd crush. On the night of 29 October 2022, during Halloween crowds, 159 people died in a sloping alley roughly 3.2 metres wide beside the Hamilton Hotel, crushed as movement in the lane locked. It remains one of the worst peacetime disasters in modern Korea. Investigations examined police and district planning failures and structures that had narrowed the alley. A memorial marks the site, and the character of the district changed afterwards: trade fell sharply, several long-running venues closed, and Halloween is no longer observed here in anything like the old way. Visitors should know what the alley is before they walk into it, and behave accordingly.

Getting there and timing. Itaewon Station, Line 6, exits 1 to 4, opens directly onto the main strip, with Noksapyeong one stop west for Gyeongnidan-gil and Hangangjin one stop east for the museums. The Leeum Museum of Art in Hannam-dong, a complex by Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas, is ten minutes' walk east and holds one of the finest collections of Korean ceramics and contemporary art in the country. Restaurants open from late morning, bars fill after nine, and weekday evenings are far more pleasant than Saturday nights. Spring and autumn suit the hill walking; summer is humid and the gradients are unforgiving. Wheelchair access along Itaewon-ro itself is workable, but the side alleys are steep, stepped and frequently blocked.