The area now known as Koreatown today first began with a singular restaurant, Seoul House, which opened in 1972. It wasn’t until the opening of a few other restaurants as well as Koryo Books in 1980 that Koreatown really started to pick up.
Koryo Books still alive and well today
As I learned in “Exotic Flavor, Beyond Just the Food” by Baldwin, Korean immigrants actually led the redevelopment of of West 32nd Street in the 1970s. The Department of City Planning’s website gave me more information. In the photo below from the Midtown Development Project Draft Report of 1980, K-town was in the middle of the Garment District and the Herald Square Retail District, and was part of the Department’s plan to begin a major rezoning project that lasted over 30 years. It was during this project that entrepreneurial Koreans, supported by the new wave of Korean immigrants to the country, were able to start small businesses.
Koreatown served primarily as an ethnic enclave for many years. Retailers would import Korean goods to sell to Korean immigrants who did not readily want to assimilate to American culture and missed foods and products from home. However, as Madison and I have learned from our interviews in Koreatown, the customer population has become more and more mixed in terms of race.
For example, as Matt from miss KOREA told us, he had more Korean customers three years ago, but with the rise in popularity of Korean culture, his customer demographics are now entirely mixed. What drove this new craze of Korean products, genre, and music? It just so happens the Korean government is a major proponent in advancing Korean culture overseas, and therefore Korean products. In fact, the most remittances South Korea receives comes from the United States; a cool 2.9 billion was sent back to the country in 2015 alone. (www.migrationpolicy.org)
A remittances graph from migrationpolicy.org
As I learned in the September 2016 article by Hwang, Chung, and Kim, “Consuming Gangnam Style: Nation-branding in Koreatown, New York and Los Angeles”, beginning in the early 2000s with the Roh administration in South Korea,government agencies enthusiastically spearheaded campaigns to promote Korean culture. There is a phenomenon called the Hallyu, or a wave of Korean popular culture rolling into a country, creating a larger fan base for Korean entertainment. This wave peaked during the Lee administration from 2008 to 2012, when the president established a Presidential Council on National Branding,the Food Service Industry Promotion Act, and the Korean Food Foundation under the former Korean Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. These organizations were specifically created to devise campaigns that would increase interest in Korean cultures. A fun campaign in New York City outlined in this article was when the Korean Food Foundation implemented its “Discover Korea’s Delicious Secret Campaign” in which mobile food trucks gave our free Korean food in various public locations in New York such as Bryant Park,Union Square, and Columbus Circle.
The government also supports beauty products, especially skin care products, which are a main commodity among Korean women. As learned from “What You Don’t Know About the Rise of Korean Beauty” by Schaefer,The Korean International Trade Association helps Korean companies start businesses in the United States by helping them create relationships with American retailers and distributors and also by having marketing training programs, specifically geared towards appealing to U.S. consumers. They also help beauty stores purely through the promotion of Korean music and Korean dramas, which frequently advertise beauty products. Also, beauty companies that are export-only receive a tax-break for the government as well as government funding in case they need to protect their business overseas in legal cases. These programs prove the Korean government has a heavy hand in the popularization of Korean products, as well as close ties with Korean companies overseas. This provides a great amount of help to companies such as Besfren, who profit from this increased exposure of Korean media to the U.S. population.
Why did this advancement of Korean culture not happen earlier? The book New Urban Immigrants: The Korean Community in New York by Illso Kim, published in 1981, provides the history of Korean immigration until the 1980s as well as amazing insight into the development of Korean businesses in metropolises such as New York City.
In 1910, Japan had control of Korea. Between 1903, and 1905,7,226 Korean immigrants had arrived in the Hawaiian Islands for work.The Islands served as a rung on the ladder of Korean immigration; many Koreans from the Island would soon move to the West Coast and beyond after accumulating enough money. But after they were under the control of a de facto Japanese protectorate, the Japanese forbade Korean immigration to the Islands in order to decrease competition between Japanese and Koreans immigrants. Also, the National Origins Act further reduced the wave of immigrants; only 2,000 Koreans, many of them refugees, came into the U.S. between 1910 and 1924 when the law was effective. The law actually was not lifted until the 1960s with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965. By this time, the Japanese had left Korea after their defeat in World War II, and a new wave of Korean immigrants came into the country. This wave would be the one that established enclaves such as Koreatown. As of 1980, the Korean population in the U.S. went to about 500,000, a giant leap from only a few thousand before the Act was passed. The table below reflects these staggering numbers.
A graph of immigration growth from migrationpolicy.org
In the beginning, we can also see that retail and wholesale business was the main occupation among immigrants in the table below.This accounts for the small Korean businesses that began Koreatown and other small enclaves as well as some history about the neighborhood.In “Secrets of Koreatown”, Jinwon Kim, a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Oberlin College, details that Koreatown was initially for wholesalers and working in the Korea Business District nearby, but they moved out as restaurants opened and rent prices skyrocketed.
Kim also gives a reason for the slow growth of Koreatown in its beginning stages. Apparently, a “welfare hotel” known as the Martinique made the area unattractive because of its terrible reputation. With its closing in 1989, businesses in K-town started to improve. We see this with the opening of restaurants such as Mandoo Bar,that we interviewed, which has been around since the 1990s and still exists today.
Now, Korea Way is booming with over 40 businesses on its street, vertically growing instead of horizontally growing, mimicking the jam-packed streets of Seoul. It attracts a wide range of customers from all over the world who want to try Korean barbecue, hot pots, face masks, and drinks. Although the enclave may not necessarily be that way anymore with the increasing popularity of K-pop groups and K-dramas, the cultural identity of the neighborhood will hopefully remain the same, where anyone can experience genuine Korean cuisine and imported goods.
