Gloomy clouds fly above Woeng Nakhon Kasem, a historic neighborhood near Chinatown. Like the uncertainty of a Bangkok rainy day, the grey clouds might pour down their rain or blow away entirely.
With a history going back more than a century, this entire community is threatened by a redevelopment project to serve the upcoming MRT station and the commercial pressures it will bring. Under the plan, hundreds of culturally irreplaceable shophouses and other structures will be torn down to erect bland commercial towers. Time is running out for this latest endangered part of Bangkok.
Here’s a visual tour of what can be found there.
At its peak, this neighborhood was a popular, commercially successful area selling all types of things – and also everything else. Today its sois aren’t as crowded as they once were, but shoppers can still find distinctive shops selling special items, especially musical instruments.
After all, where else could you take a busted African tumba drum for repair, as a group of women traveled from Rangsit to do on a recent afternoon
“We came all the way from Rangsit to fix our drum.”
Some regulars still come to haunt its shops and streets; others come to visit a place they fear will soon be lost forever.
One thing that hasn’t changed in this neighborhood is that while shopping, it’s easy to fall into a long conversation with the shop owner or staff, something that just isn’t going to happen inside the latest gleaming shopping mall profanity.
To make way for the expected development after the MRT station opens, the Pee Raka market, a 100-year-old part of the neighborhood already closed down two years ago. It remains as a small alley with a few vendors slinging food.
The food is one of the characteristics of this area that’s stayed alive. Food vendors line the alleys starting at the gate next to the Yong Send music shop, near the Wat Tuek Intersection. Starting at 5am, fresh toast can be found with milk drinks until about 4pm every day except Sunday. For lunch or dinner, a cart sells noodles with roasted pork not far from another serving noodles with pork meatballs.
A few shops have already relocated out of the area while many others still remain operating as normal. The area is good for wandering around to absorb and experience Woeng Nakhon Kasem. The shopfront and arcades are quite different from each other, reflecting the personal styles of their owners.
Apart from the commercial zone, the community is still home to thriving residences held by families from generation to generation. You can glimpse life as normal on the upper stories of each building, where clothes still hang to dry and small gardens blossom.
“I have been here for far too long. I’m kind of lucky that I have a reserve location to move afterward, but it’s still sad. Did you see my townhouse? I built that, you know, the top floor,” a shop owner said.
From rare vintage books to newly published children’s titles, you can find everything at Woeng Nakhon Kasem’s independent bookstores. Most of them are in Thai with small selections of English books.
“They told us they want our neighbourhood to be better organized. The current shop owners will have a spot, a very small room at the new Woeng with eight floors and a parking lot. People can’t live at their ‘home’ any longer. ‘It’s not well organized,’ they said.”
“The contract for my shop and others in my lot will end in September. The market in the back is already torn down. I don’t know what will happen, but we hope to be able to extend our contract.”
Like the rain that ended our visit to Woeng Nakhon Kasem, its future looks cloudy.
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