Often found at theaters and museums, Kwon Mee-yoo has covered a wide range of cultural fields from K-pop and dramas to theater and fine art for over a decade. Now as K-Culture Desk editor, she tries to connect Korean culture with global readers through fresh perspectives.
Rewiring Seoul's urban heart
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The last column of the Ahyeon Overpass is lifted by a crane on March 26. The take-down of the 46-year-old overpass was completed in about 45 days, starting from Feb. 9. / Korea Times photos by Shim Hyun-chul
By Kwon Mee-yoo
By Kwon Mee-yoo
Seoul has just demolished its oldest elevated road and for some, it was hard not to find symbolism in this.
When completed in 1968, the one-kilometer long Ahyeon Overpass was touted as a feature vital to the city’s future, a facilitator of a larger cities, more cars and more bustling commercial activity.
The folly of placing major roads through the heart of cities is widely understood in 2014 and Seoul City officials were eager to tear down the road to make room for 21st century urban planning.
The four-lane overpass, which stretched from Junglim-dong to Ahyeon-dong, was a route for 80,000 vehicles per day. It was the first overpass constructed in Korea, aimed at easing traffic congestion from the city’s center to the fast growing districts of Mapo, Chungjeongno and Sinchon.
Two people look at the construction site over Ahyeon Overpass when the elevated driveway was opened for the public on Feb. 8. The demolition of the overpass has caused an increase in property prices in the neighboring area.
After the condition of the overpass deteriorated in recent years, municipal officials were forced to lower the road’s maximum weight allowance from 40 tons to 20 tons a day in 2004.
But this was after the overpass ceased to be regarded as a trophy of industrialization and was hated just as much as the industrial megaliths created in the earlier part of the country’s construction frenzy.
Awareness grew that the overpass was negatively impacting the lives of the people who lived near it and those who ran businesses nearby. The bifurcated environment was blamed for the emergence of slums and seedy entertainment districts.
In recent years, Seoul City was spent 400 million won a year on maintaining the Ahyeon Overpass and this was after it spent 8 billion won on a major repair project in the early 2000s. The city’s council finally decided to tear the road down in 2009.
The road was closed on Feb. 6, three days before workers started demolition of it. It took only about two months for workers to tear down the 46-year-old structure.
Despite the necessary destruction, Seoul City recognized the historical value of the Ahyeon Overpass and commemorated it by preserving its nameplate in the Seoul Museum of History.
Days before closing the road, the city government cut off traffic to allow people to walk on the overpass for the last time. This was only the second time the Ahyeon Overpass was opened up for pedestrian access since 1987, when the funeral cortege of Lee Han-yeol, a Yonsei University student killed by police during a democracy rally, passed along the road.
One woman named Kim, who came to the overpass with her family, said, “I thought it would be memorable to walk this overpass which I passed by almost every day on a bus.”
A boy watches people walking on the Ahyeon Overpass in Chungjeongno, central Seoul, on Feb. 8. The city government opened the elevated road for visitors for the day as part of a commemorative event before demolishing it.
The space will be replaced by a 2.2-kilomemter bus-only lane, connecting Sinchon-ro and Mapo-ro, which is to be completed by July. Seoul city officials claim that the new bus lane will allow cars in the area to move “28 percent faster.”
But most residents and business people in the area appear to be glad that the overpass is finally gone.
“Good riddance,” said a merchant who works in Ahyeon-dong’s famous furniture district.
“The neighborhood was sunless, but is much brighter because the overpass is gone now. I feel sorry for a part of history is gone, but we can make new history here.”
A real estate agent told The Korea Times that land value is rising again, due to rising expectations of development. Bugahyeon-dong is already going through a redevelopment plan and two large apartment complexes are currently under construction.
The neighboring district of Seodaemun-gu is also expecting a boost in property value and commercial activity. Officials from the district office said that the removal of the overpass could help their efforts to promote the revamped Sinchon area, which went through a major overhaul last year to make its main commercial street more pedestrian friendly.
“More people have been coming to Sinchon, which has regained its old glory as a buzzing leisure district. We are thinking about similar changes for the streets in front of Ewha Womans University and possibly the broader Ahyeon-dong area, which is now possible with the overpass gone,” he said.
As Seoul City changed its traffic plan to be more pedestrian-friendly, 16 overpasses have already been torn down, including the Cheonggye Overpass in 2003 and the Hongje Overpass in 2012.
Eighty-five of them still remain in the city, but many of them are likely to be pulled down like the Ahyeon Overpass. The city authorities believe there is more to gain from removing the overpasses in terms of the improvement of scenery and reductions in maintenance cost.
However, there are experts who claim that the overpasses might be missed. Shim Gyo-eon, a real estate professor at Konkuk University, argues that fewer overpasses will hurt the accessibility to the area, contrary to what city officials say.
“Fewer vehicles passing through the area means a reduction in economic activity, and no one has estimated the social cost of this,” Shim said.
He mentioned New York City’s High Line as a good example of how an area around an old structure found new life and value. The 1.6-kilometer High Line was originally an elevated railroad for industrial purposes, but abandoned in the 1980s as rail traffic dropped.
In the late 1990s, a non-profit organization Friends of the High Line suggested preserving the old railway as a park and reopened it as an elevated greenway in 2009. It became a popular tourist destination in the Big Apple, drawing over 4 million visitors in 2012.
“If Seoul City revamped Hoehyeon Overpass, which was demolished in 2009, in a way similar to the High Line, it might have attracted tourist visiting Myeong-dong. I’m not opposed to the traffic system centering on pedestrians and public transportation, but urban restoration could be more than just tearing down any old thing,” Shim said.