KBO | Dongdaemun Baseball Stadium — Where the League Began, and What Stands There Now

Two floodlight towers stand in a park in Jung-gu with nothing left to light. They are the last of the towers that ringed Dongdaemun Stadium, and they are the most direct thing a visitor can still touch of the ground where Korean professional baseball started.

The ballpark opened in 1925 as part of Gyeongseong Stadium (경성운동장), built by the Japanese colonial administration on ground cleared from the Hanyang city wall. It was Seoul Stadium from 1945, and Dongdaemun Baseball Stadium (동대문야구장) from 1985. For sixty years it was the centre of Korean high-school baseball, the tournament ground where a school could make its town's name in a single week. And on 27 March 1982, the KBO played its first game here.

Seoul closed it in December 2007 and brought it down the following March. What went up in its place is Zaha Hadid's Dongdaemun Design Plaza, a seamless aluminium form that opened in March 2014 and is the opposite of a concrete grandstand in every respect. Digging the foundations turned up the Yigansumun water gate and a stretch of the old city wall, so the park behind the DDP is now an archaeological site as well as a memorial.

The Dongdaemun Stadium Memorial (동대문운동장기념관) sits in that park at 281 Eulji-ro. Admission is free and it closes on Mondays. Inside are salvaged grandstand seats and lamps taken out of the floodlight towers when the stadium came down. Go back outside afterwards and look up at the two towers still standing: those are the lights that were burning over the league's first night games.

Photos: 서울시 사진기록화사업 2005, CC BY 2.0 KR; Wikihyo, CC0 — both via Wikimedia Commons