The Neighborhood That Korea Couldn't Name

How 144 Years of Occupation Built Seoul's Most Transgressive Space

Seoulacious Spaces, Part I

There are three ways to write "Itaewon" in Korean, and none of them are neutral.

All three are pronounced exactly the same—이태원 (Itaewon)—but use different Chinese characters that radically change the meaning. Same sound, different story.

The first version, 梨泰院 (Lee-Tae-Won), suggests "House of Pear Trees"—a benign image of 17th-century orchards that almost nobody believes. The second, 異他人 (Yi-Ta-In), translates as "People from Different Places," referencing defeated Japanese soldiers who settled here after the 1592 war. The third interpretation is the one that makes Koreans uncomfortable: 異胎院 (Yi-Tae-Won), "Circle of Different Placenta," directly referencing Korean women who bore the children of Japanese soldiers after systematic wartime rape.

A neighborhood's name is supposed to tell you where you are. Itaewon's three competing etymologies tell you something else entirely: this is a place Korea has never quite known what to do with.

Walk through Itaewon today and you'll see rainbow flags hanging next to halal restaurants, luxury apartments rising above military surplus stores, K-pop covers playing in hookah lounges. Seoul Central Mosque sits on the neighborhood's highest hill. The Hamilton Hotel—named for an American general—anchors the main drag. Young Koreans line up outside clubs that, two decades ago, their parents would have forbidden them from entering.

This is the story of how occupation became liberation, how stigma became style, and how the neighborhood Korea tried to forget became the place everyone wants to be seen.

The Geography of Exclusion

Itaewon occupies 2.43 square kilometers of central Seoul—less than half the size of New York's Central Park—yet for over a century it functioned as a spatial rupture through the city's heart. The reason was simple: the 635-acre Yongsan Garrison, a military base that created what scholars call a "void" in Seoul's urban fabric.

Here's what you need to understand: Itaewon didn't become strange despite being in central Seoul. It became strange because it was in central Seoul, right next to an occupation force.

The Japanese Imperial Army established its headquarters at Yongsan in 1904. When Japan surrendered in 1945, American forces took over the barracks within days—a nearly unprecedented direct transfer of colonial infrastructure from one empire to another. The buildings stayed the same. The barbed wire stayed up. Only the uniforms changed.

For the next 73 years, 20,000 American troops occupied land in the geographic center of Korea's capital. And every night, when soldiers got permission to leave base, they walked into Itaewon.

The Korean government's response was pragmatic and devastating. In 1957, officials deliberately pushed sex workers out of central Seoul into Itaewon, creating what became known as a kijich'on—a camptown. The women were told they were "patriotic ambassadors" earning foreign currency. They were given mandatory classes on STD prevention, hygiene, and English language. The government framed sex work as national service while society stigmatized the women as national pollutants.

By the 1970s, Itaewon had become what one photographer described as "Korea but not ours. Soldiers, prostitution. Everybody was stoned."

This deterritorialized status—Korean soil that didn't feel Korean—would define everything that came after.

When Stigma Becomes Style

The phrase "Itaewon Freedom" captures the neighborhood's strange duality. Originally, it referenced the legal immunity US soldiers enjoyed under Status of Forces Agreement provisions. If you committed a crime in Itaewon, Korean law didn't always apply. Freedom meant power without accountability.

But watch how the meaning flipped.

By 2011, hip-hop duo UV and JYP released a hit song called "Itaewon Freedom" celebrating the neighborhood's "open atmosphere" contrasting with conservative Korean culture. The chorus became an anthem: Itaewon Freedom, gonna let it loose tonight. What had meant Korean powerlessness got reclaimed as cultural liberation.

Here's the mechanism: The same characteristics that made Itaewon dangerous—foreigners, English speakers, people who didn't follow Korean social rules—made it the only place certain communities could exist openly.

LGBTQ+ Koreans found rare safety in streets where difference was already normalized. The neighborhood's transgressive reputation provided cover. If Itaewon was already "not really Korea," then queer visibility didn't register as shocking—it was just another form of otherness in a space built on otherness.

Muslim migrants established community around Seoul Central Mosque, built in 1976. While Korea's Muslim population remains tiny (about 0.3% of 51 million), Itaewon became the de facto Islamic center because it was the one neighborhood where religious difference didn't automatically signal threat.

International restaurants served actual immigrant communities, not tourist fantasies. Pakistani workers could find halal food. Nigerian students could get jollof rice. The Thai restaurant on the side street was run by Thais, for Thais—who happened to let Koreans in too.

Artists and musicians developed Seoul's underground scene at venues like Moon Night in the 1990s, where Yang Hyun-suk (YG Entertainment founder) and Park Jin-young (JYP Entertainment founder) credit their artistic vision taking shape. Some consider Moon Night ground zero of K-pop—the club where Black American GIs introduced hip-hop and new jack swing to Korean dancers who would go on to shape an entire industry. As scholar Myoung-Sun Song documents in Hanguk Hip Hop: Global Rap in South Korea, Korea's contemporary pop music DNA got assembled in the neighborhood where cultural rules were already suspended.

The pattern repeats: marginalized groups claimed the stigmatized space precisely because it was stigmatized. Itaewon's bad reputation became its best feature.

Itaewon's "difference" was being packaged, curated, and sold back to Koreans as lifestyle.

The neighborhood's queer visibility followed a similar pattern. Hong Seok-cheon—Korea's first openly gay celebrity—lost everything when he was forcibly outed on a variety show in 2000. Fired from all his TV programs and advertisements amid public uproar, facing stigma and discrimination that kept him inside his social circle, he could have left Korea. Instead, he opened his first restaurant in Itaewon in 2002.

Two decades later, he owns nine successful restaurants in the neighborhood—the "My" chain including My Thai, My Hong, My China, My Chelsea, My Noodle, My Sweet—with annual sales reaching 7 billion won. Real estate agents started saying "If you want to be successful in Itaewon, you must open a restaurant like Hong Seok-cheon." He earned the nickname "Emperor of Itaewon," credited with revitalizing the back alleys by opening venues where everyone felt welcome.

Hong's success story exemplifies Itaewon's function: the one neighborhood where someone completely shut out of mainstream Korean society could rebuild, succeed, and eventually become an icon. By the 2010s, his restaurants weren't just serving food—they were landmarks signaling that difference could be profitable, that marginalization could become brand equity.

The Netflix Effect and the Double Tragedy

By 2020, Itaewon's symbolic transformation was complete. The Netflix drama Itaewon Class portrayed an ex-convict opening a restaurant with transgender staff, biracial Koreans, and fellow ex-cons fighting against a chaebol corporation. The show achieved 16.5% nationwide audience share and became the most-searched drama of 2020.

In Episode 9, LGBTQ+ icon Hong Seok-cheon appears and declares: "Itaewon symbolizes freedom—a place where different cultures can mingle freely, free from restraints."

Mainstream Korea had officially embraced what it had spent decades rejecting. Itaewon was no longer the neighborhood parents warned their children about. It was the neighborhood everyone wanted their Instagram followers to see them in.

Halloween had become Itaewon's unofficial signature event—not registered with the city, not formally organized, but drawing massive crowds every year for elaborate costumes and street parties. The neighborhood's transgressive reputation made it the natural home for a Western holiday that conservative Korea still viewed with suspicion. Young Koreans flooded in—not just queer youth or international hipsters, but ordinary office workers seeking escape from hierarchical work culture.

Then came May 2020.

A COVID-19 outbreak traced to Itaewon clubs sparked a homophobia backlash that revealed how quickly "multicultural tolerance" could collapse into scapegoating. Media used sensational language about the "dark side of gay bathhouses." Conservative groups blamed the LGBTQ+ community. Some people provided fake contact information during contact tracing from fear of discrimination—revealing how state oppression creates public health crises, then blames marginalized communities for the consequences.

The outbreak cored out the neighborhood. Businesses shuttered. Foot traffic vanished. The same young Koreans who had flocked to Itaewon for "freedom" now avoided it as a contagion zone. Scholars identified this as the beginning of "COVID-19 degentrification"—rows of empty storefronts, collapsed sales, though landlords still refused to lower rents.

Itaewon was back to being dangerous. Back to being Other. Back to being the place respectable Koreans didn't go.

On October 29, 2022, that dangerous reputation collided with the Halloween tradition that had never been officially acknowledged.

159 people died in a crowd crush in a 3.2-meter-wide alleyway. Most victims were young women in their twenties. An estimated 100,000-130,000 people had descended on the neighborhood for the first Halloween celebration without COVID restrictions since 2019. Despite 11 emergency calls starting at 6:34 PM (four hours before the crush) warning of dangerous crowding, only 137 police officers were on duty.

That same night, 6,500 officers monitored a 25,000-person protest elsewhere in Seoul. A month earlier, 1,300 officers worked a 55,000-person BTS concert.

The disparity revealed whose safety matters to the state. Halloween in Itaewon wasn't an official event, so it didn't merit official protection. The neighborhood's transgressive character—its whole appeal—meant authorities treated massive crowds as a problem to ignore rather than manage.

The tragedy crystallized profound questions: whose bodies belong in Korean public space, whose deaths demand accountability, and whether Itaewon's celebrated "freedom" was built on decades of infrastructural neglect. The memorial alley created afterward raises uncomfortable questions about commemoration—how to honor victims without turning tragedy into tourist spectacle, how to demand state accountability without scapegoating individuals, how to prevent future disasters without securitizing public space into repressive control.

The Halloween crush revealed what celebration obscured: Itaewon's transformation from stigmatized camptown to celebrated multicultural district had never actually addressed the spatial infrastructure. The same narrow alleys built to contain sex workers in the 1960s were now hosting 100,000 young people, and nobody had considered whether the physical space could accommodate the symbolic transformation.

The economic impact devastated what the COVID outbreak had already weakened. The 2022 holiday season saw only 10% of prior year's traffic, while other Seoul districts like Hongdae and Myeongdong remained crowded. By 2024, Itaewon had become a place of mourning and memorial. Halloween 2024 deployed 4,900 police officers—a stark reversal that came two years too late.

Itaewon had cemented its place in the Korean mind as a source of threat and fear. Not because of foreign soldiers anymore. Because the state had allowed marginalized communities to build something vibrant in neglected space, then failed to protect the ordinary young Koreans who showed up to enjoy it.

The American Departure That Wasn't

In 2018, US forces finally relocated from Yongsan Garrison to Camp Humphreys, 64 kilometers south of Seoul. After 114 years of continuous military occupation—first Japanese, then American—the garrison was supposed to convert into Yongsan National Urban Park.

Seven years later, only 30% of the land has been returned.

The rest remains in dispute over environmental contamination cleanup costs (estimated at $2.1 trillion won), historical preservation debates, and security concerns. Korean taxpayers are subsidizing cleanup of pollution created by American military, while SOFA provisions create jurisdictional obstacles to accountability.

The park that does eventually open will primarily benefit adjacent wealthy property owners whose land values have already skyrocketed. Critics call it a "private garden for the rich" rather than genuinely public commons.

Meanwhile, Itaewon itself faces displacement from another direction: the Hannam New Town redevelopment project is demolishing approximately one square kilometer of neighborhood, evicting 8,000 households to construct luxury apartments branded "The H Hannam"—appropriating nearby Hannam-dong's upscale reputation despite being primarily in working-class Bogwang-dong.

Here's the pattern: Itaewon became valuable precisely because it was stigmatized and cheap. Artists, immigrants, and queer communities could afford space there. Their presence made it culturally significant. Cultural significance attracted capital. Capital drives out the communities that created the value in the first place.

The same gentrification-to-degentrification cycle playing out in Brooklyn, Berlin, and Barcelona is compressing in Itaewon at Korean speed.

What Itaewon Reveals

Every city has neighborhoods that don't quite fit. But Itaewon's transgressive character wasn't incidental—it was structural, built into the land by 144 years of military occupation creating legal, cultural, and spatial exception.

The neighborhood's transformation reveals three uncomfortable truths about contemporary Korea:

First, diversity only became valuable when it became profitable. For decades, Itaewon's multicultural character was evidence of national shame—foreign soldiers, "fallen women," people who couldn't or wouldn't be properly Korean. The moment Seoul wanted to signal "global city" aspirations, that same diversity became an asset to market. The communities creating that diversity face displacement as their presence gets commodified.

Second, progressive cultural spaces often emerge from oppressive conditions. Itaewon's queer visibility, artistic freedom, and religious tolerance weren't gifts from enlightened policy. They were survival strategies by marginalized communities exploiting spatial exception created by military occupation. Celebrating the freedom without acknowledging its origins sanitizes the exploitation that made it necessary.

Third, "liberation" and "gentrification" can be the same process. Young Koreans celebrating Itaewon's openness aren't wrong—the neighborhood genuinely offers freedoms unavailable elsewhere in conservative Korea. But that celebration itself drives the transformation that displaces the communities who created and defended those freedoms when they were still dangerous.

The phrase "Itaewon Freedom" contains this whole contradiction. Freedom from what? Korean social rules? American military immunity? Patriarchal surveillance? Heteronormative expectations? Economic precarity?

All of the above. And the freedom keeps shifting depending on who gets to claim it.

The Layers That Won't Resolve

Here's what makes Itaewon theoretically significant beyond its physical boundaries: it's a place where each power structure wrote itself onto the same 2.43 square kilometers without erasing what came before. History doesn't disappear here—it accumulates.

Walk the same streets where Mongol forces encamped in the 13th century, Japanese colonizers built barracks in the 20th century, American soldiers bought drinks in camptown bars, sex workers survived through "patriotic service," Muslim migrants established Korea's first mosque, LGBTQ+ Koreans found safety in stigmatized space, and young Instagram influencers now photograph themselves against "gritty authentic" backdrops.

Every layer remains visible if you know where to look.

The Seoul Central Mosque still calls prayer five times daily on the hill above Hamilton Hotel. Military surplus stores sell American camping gear next to Korean streetwear boutiques. The memorial alley for October 29 victims sits two blocks from clubs hosting Asia's largest queer festival. Halal restaurants share walls with craft cocktail bars serving ₩18,000 Old Fashioneds.

This isn't multicultural harmony. This is spatial layering of unresolved conflicts, uncomfortably coexisting because there's nowhere else to go.

Itaewon's significance extends beyond Seoul because it reveals what happens when occupation becomes infrastructure, when stigma becomes brand, when otherness becomes asset. Every global city wants the diversity Itaewon represents. Few want to acknowledge that such diversity often emerges from histories of violence, exploitation, and marginalization that never got resolved—just repackaged.

The neighborhood Korea couldn't name turned into the neighborhood everybody claims. That transformation wasn't triumph over history. It was history taking new form.

Itaewon's three competing etymologies still compete because the neighborhood's identity remains contested. House of Pear Trees? People from Different Places? Circle of Different Placenta?

Maybe all three. Maybe none. Maybe the point is that Itaewon never needed to resolve into single meaning—it just needed to keep providing space for the people and communities that don't fit anywhere else.

That space is shrinking now. The question facing Seoul in 2025 isn't whether Itaewon will change—it's already changing. The question is whether the change will genuinely decolonize space and democratize belonging, or whether it will simply replace one form of exclusion with another.

Watch what happens to the halal restaurants when luxury apartments go up. Watch what happens to queer clubs when property values triple. Watch what happens to immigrant communities when "multicultural" becomes marketing rather than reality.

Itaewon's three etymologies won't resolve. But watching which one becomes dominant will tell you everything about what kind of city Seoul chooses to become.