Hongdae Playground through ages
Earlier this year, temporary fencing went up around Hongdae Playground while renovations began. After it reopened, the changes stirred up a lot of deep memories in me.
I solicited my friends through social media for their memories about Hongdae Playground over the years. As the stories poured in, I started to notice trends that could be chronologically arranged.
On my own first time coming to Hongdae in December 2003, it was a peaceful university residential area with lots of creative types and plenty of affordable restaurants and bars but not many foreigners (no offense intended). As summer arrived, I began hanging out more and more in Hongdae Playground. I recall in April 2004 seeing a concert there with several familiar punk bands, including the Geeks and Bae-dareun Hyeongjae (Half Brothers, featuring future Kingston Rudieska frontman Suk-yuel).
In those days, you could wander through any time and see punks sitting there, mostly next to the playground equipment. Typically, we would congregate there, go to a punk show at Skunk Hell, and come back to the playground after. It was the cheapest place to drink in Hongdae, and we’d buy in bulk from convenience stores and drink communally.
I still recall Aug. 15, 2004, the first time I stayed there until sunrise. That summer, much of the equipment was still new, and it was clean enough you could just lie down anywhere and sleep on the crushed-old-tires rubber ground, the benches or the playground equipment.
At the time I was told the playground was already ruined, that the previous year during the 2002 World Cup it had been an unpaved bit of wilderness where normal people feared to tread.
The following summer, as normal people continued their incursions, it became less friendly to our Korean punk friends, but the foreign punks held on longer. And as we felt encroached upon, our antisocial behavior worsened.
Late at night, we would hold fight clubs, which I probably just broke a couple rules by disclosing. It wasn’t rare to see the spongy grounds splattered with blood, or for a friendly sparring match to turn personal.
When it was discovered we could easily purchase Roman candle fireworks from a nearby convenience store, we began holding late-night “Harry Potter” fireworks battles. Often I would climb on top of the Hongdae Playground washroom where I could safely snipe off the others. We had to call off the firefights after one incident in which a stray bolt fired by somebody ricocheted and exploded right next to the ear of a random stranger.
We also would bring out permanent markers every time someone fell asleep. My favorite thing to do was when a skinhead passed out, draw on the back or top of his head, which he might not notice until someone told him the next morning. We colored in the face of one friend deeply passed out, trying to give him blackface; fortunately we didn’t get that far. Things went too far one night when someone drew on the face of a homeless guy who fell asleep in the park.
The playground attracted many strange characters. I’ve already written about the makgeolli man, but there was the “crazy park lady” who clearly had mental problems. She’d drink in the playground with her small, sad dog, and she knew enough English to harass us. There was the swing kid, a guy in his early 20s maybe who would come to the playground every day to swing on the swings. He’d go really high, for long periods of time, and have the biggest smile on his face. Usually it would end when the “park nazi,” an elderly man at the senior community center there, came out and blew his whistle to get him off the swing so younger kids could have a turn. And there was a loveable guy with a mental problem someone nicknamed Jimmy. He wasn’t great with words so someone gave him a harmonica to speak with, on which he turned out to be a prodigy. I wish I knew where he was now.
Gradually, around the turn of the decade, the playground started to fill up with normal people and there were events that displaced punks. The same cover band would play the same covers every week. And there was the silent disco, where everyone gets earphones and dances along to music only they can hear.
Around 2010, some punks formed the Purge Movement, putting on punk shows in the playground to “purge” it of those unwanted elements. Ultimately, the more we tried to preserve the playground through such declarations and territorial claims, the more we lost it to the hated normal people.
And with the recent renovations, the playground is hardly recognizable anymore.
Renovations took out the playground equipment, plus a lot of the bench seating and plant areas, creating a wider open space. The public washroom, declared “Seoul Best Toilet” in 2002, now looks like a medieval fortress clad in wooden bars, with big sharp intimidating spikes to prevent anyone from getting on top. There are no more punks here.
To my friends who only remember Hongdae before gentrification took hold, it’s no longer the playground we remember fondly.