Cheonggyecheon: Thirty Years Under a Highway — Epoche A2
Two photos of the same place, thirty years apart. That is this week's post. On Sunday I walked along Cheonggyecheon, the stream that runs through central Seoul. It lies below street level: stone banks, stepping stones across the water, office workers eating lunch on the steps. You go down a staircase, and the traffic noise fades above your head. In the evening my landlady showed me a photo from the 1980s. Same place. In the photo there is no water at all — there is an elevated highway on thick concrete legs, full of cars. The stream came first. After the war, Seoul was poor and crowded, and the dirty stream was covered over with concrete. In the early 1970s the city finished an elevated expressway on top of it. For about thirty years the water ran in the dark under the road, and many people forgot it was there. In 2003 the city began tearing the highway down, and in 2005 the stream opened again as a long, sunken park. One more surprise: the water is pumped in from the Han River, because the old stream is too small to fill itself all year. Last night I went back. People sat with their feet near the water, and above them there was nothing but evening air, where a motorway used to stand.