Itaewon Class | Gyeongnidan-gil — The Street That Lost the Rent Fight

Itaewon Class is a drama about rent. Strip away the revenge plot and it is sixteen episodes of a man trying to hold a lease against people with more money, and Gyeongnidan-gil is the street where that argument actually played out. It runs about a kilometre from the old army finance command building up towards the Hyatt. The US garrison next door made this a foreigners' quarter for decades, which meant cafés, bars and restaurants aimed at people who wanted something other than Korean food, which in turn made it fashionable in the 2010s. Celebrities opened places. Rents followed. Then the businesses that made the street worth visiting could no longer pay to be on it, the garrison relocated, and Covid finished the job. Visitors say it plainly now: this was once the centre of Seoul's food and nightlife and it has seen better days. Landlords raised rents astronomically and drove out the geese laying the golden eggs. There are still good places — the street has been quietly refilling — but it is not what it was in 2020 when the drama used it. That is worth knowing before you come, and it is also the most on-theme thing about the location. Sae-ro-yi's enemy is a conglomerate that can outlast him. The real Gyeongnidan-gil lost that fight to landlords. Walk up from the bottom in the early evening and count the shuttered frontages between the open ones. The drama ends with the small operator winning. The street it was filmed on is the version where he did not, and both are worth seeing. Cover photo: a street in Seoul, by AhmedAlElq, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Area view, not Gyeongnidan-gil.