Last time I wrote about the area of Seoul without high-rise apartment buildings — the traditional, and fashionable neighborhood of Bukchon. Writing about an area with no high-rise apartments made me think about Seoul’s history of high-rise apartments. When I first came to Korea in 1965, every neighborhood was like Bukchon. One-story hanok, and two-story “new” homes that were being built in the '60s. No five-story walk-ups — they were the next to come. No elevators, but four- and five-story apartment buildings. In New York, that kind of apartment building is called a “walk-up” — meaning no elevator! I remember an incident in 1968, when a set of five-story walk-up apartments was being built. There was a set of those apartments — new and modern — in Mapo or Yongsan, built on the banks of the Han River. The river began to erode the banks, weakening the buildings’ foundations, and eventually they collapsed into the river. The thing I remember about that incident was the wife of the director of our program then, who commented, “Somehow these people need to learn how t