Susaek Station Lunch Walk: An Old Seoul Neighborhood by the Underpass

Daily · Published 7/19/2023 ·

Susaek Station is a pretty old station. It only has one exit, and the route over to the DMC side of town usually isn’t easy to spot. So for a while I’d ride all the way to DMC Station, walk through two subway lines back to back, and then double back on foot — over and over.

Then I found out there’s an underground passage, and I gave it a try on my way to work. It cut the distance way down. After lunch one day, I decided to take a walk from the Nuri Kkum Square building where my office is, on a route that goes through Susaek Station. The path is shown in the screenshot below. It starts by crossing the street at the corner of the MBC building and heading through the underpass.

Once you cross over and look toward the lower end of the park, the underpass appears. Riding bikes, kickboards and the like through it is prohibited… but everyone just rides through anyway. Rules are there to be followed… kind of a shame.

It had rained a lot, so there was standing water and everything was damp. There was that recent underpass flooding incident too, and this year the rainy season has caused all kinds of problems. As I write this, now it’s a heat wave… The minimum clearance is listed as 180cm. They probably wrote it conservatively, but it’s a really low underpass.

The exit has all the marks of age and an old-world charm fully intact. It was raining so I hadn’t brought a proper camera, but next time I should bring the Leica. There’s a retaining wall built from a mix of stone and cement, and a tiny street stall too. I walked along marveling that places like this still exist in Seoul. With high-rise apartments looming in the background, it makes for an interesting scene.

When you come out, there’s a building on a triangular plot across the street that looks about the same age. This neighborhood must have developed pretty slowly. There was even a pawnshop sign, and I wondered if it was still in business. The rain gave everything a calm mood, so the photo came out a little heavy.

I turned to the left. Apparently if you keep going straight you reach Goyang, and there’s a bridge called Susaek-gyo.

This is the police box building right in front of Susaek Station. There’s a flag flying on the roof and cones blocking off parking for the general public, which got me thinking about a few things. If you need to handle some civil paperwork you’d have to park, but it’s all blocked off… And even though the flag was up, I didn’t see any sign of anyone around. Maybe they’d already wrapped up for the day?

Here’s the Susaek Station sign. Go in to the left and you’ll find Susaek Station Exit 1. It’s a station you can use on the Gyeongui–Jungang Line, and you can see the MBC building across the way.

There’s a tree that looks incredibly old. It’s been faithfully holding its spot for many, many years.

There’s also a clinic that looks like it’s no longer open for business. Judging by the building’s finish, it’s easily 30 years old…

If you walk toward Susaek-gyo, you come to an overpass — but that one is off-limits to the general public. It looked like it’s for railway staff commuting to and from work.

A horizon you don’t often get to see in Seoul. It’s a hill, of course… but with no tall buildings on either side and the sky opening up completely, that kind of horizon is hard to find anywhere else.

This is the railway tracks looking toward Sinchon from atop Susaek-gyo. A tangled, complicated web of lines. I walked up the road you can see on the left and I’m now crossing back over to the DMC side.

As I was crossing, I noticed a red train at the maintenance depot. I wondered, “Huh, does that thing actually move?” — and lo and behold… as I stood there thinking about it, it started right up and pulled away. Pretty cool.

The route was about 2km, and I walked it slowly over roughly 30 minutes. Strolling through the well-maintained, spotless DMC district is fun too, but every now and then a course like this — an old part of town where you can really feel the passage of time — seemed pretty nice.

#LunchWalk #SusaekStationEntrance #WalkingFromSusaekToDMC #Underpass

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