It’s August, and the heat is just starting to build. Looking for somewhere to catch a whiff of the sea without traveling far, Incheon comes to mind—a city close enough to reach from Seoul by subway. Here, the alley where Korea’s first door to modernity opened stands side by side with a coastline that drew its own picture of a new era. Today’s journey begins at the first of those two places: Gaehangjang (Open Port Area) Street.

This street is where unfamiliar foreign goods and customs washed in like waves some 140 years ago—and also where uninvited guests once set foot alongside them. Yet for those who walk through Gaehangjang today, what lingers is less a sense of heaviness than an unexpected liveliness. Rather than hiding the weight of what it endured, the district etched that history plainly into its streets, turning it into local color and into part of everyday Korean life. To take in the results of that transformation, we start at Incheon Station.

Not far from Incheon Station, a traditional Chinese gate marking the entrance to Chinatown greets visitors. This is where the walk into Gaehangjang Street begins. When Incheon’s port opened in 1883, this small harbor town suddenly became a place where several nations set foot at once. China and Japan each carved out their own concession—a district set aside for their own nationals to live in—and traces of those old boundaries remain today as Chinatown and the Japanese-style street nearby.

Following the Japanese-style street leads to Incheon Art Platform, a cultural and arts complex built by preserving modern-era buildings used from the late 1800s through 1948. Today it houses exhibitions, a book café, a bookstore and artist residencies. Listening to the laughter of the present day seeping through the old brick walls, there’s something quietly moving about a city that chose to repurpose its scars rather than hide them.

Not far away is the Daebul Hotel Exhibition Hall, a restoration of Korea’s first Western-style lodging, which originally opened in 1885, telling the history of the modern lodging industry in Incheon’s Jung-gu District. The adjoining Living History Exhibition Hall recreates daily life in Jung-gu during the 1960s and 1970s—everything from the inside of an ordinary home to a tavern, a theater and a tea house—all faithfully reconstructed, so that walking through it feels like stepping back in time.

Walking a street packed with exhibition halls—Incheon Open Port Modern Architecture Exhibition Hall, Incheon Open Port Museum, the Hallyu Video Content Hall, among others—eventually works up an appetite. Conveniently, this is the birthplace of jjajangmyeon, the Korean-style Chinese noodle dish created by Chinese immigrants who settled here during the open-port era. The shop said to have first sold jjajangmyeon has since closed and now stands as a Jjajangmyeon Museum documenting its origins, but the surrounding alleys are still lined with old Chinese restaurants doing brisk business. Settling into one of them, a bowl of noodles stir-fried in hot black sauce arrives, and over that bowl, it’s hard not to reflect on the 140 years this street has endured and, in the end, made its own.

With a full stomach, a short walk toward the sea leads to Wolmido Island. Home to an amusement park with a red Ferris wheel and a strip of seafood restaurants, Wolmido Island has been one of Incheon’s go-to outing spots since the 1980s and ’90s. Past the modest rides of the amusement park, board the Wolmi Sea Train, which loops around the island. Over the roughly 42-minute circuit, Incheon Port, the Incheon Bridge and the slanting light of late afternoon all drift past the windows.

Around sunset, we arrive in Songdo International City, in Incheon’s Yeonsu-gu District. This area was once open sea—reclaimed by piling and compacting sand along the Yeonsu-gu coastline. The lungs and centerpiece of this city is Central Park, home to Korea’s first park built with seawater drawn in from the coast, with a waterway running straight through its middle. The grid of streets flanking that waterway, along with the glass towers around them, begin catching the sunset and turning red.

Once the sun fully sets, the city comes alive as if someone flipped a switch. Lights fill the buildings one by one, and the glow bounces off the glass exteriors, multiplying many times over. Inside the park, sculptures take on an entirely different expression under soft lighting than they do by day, and the bridges strung across the waterway light up in sequence, casting long shadows across the water. The scene stretching out ahead feels exotic, even dreamlike—as if someone designed a stage just for this city’s nights.

Renting a kayak from Central Park’s East Boathouse, it’s now time to head out onto the water. Each stroke of the paddle breaks the reflected lights into fine pieces that shimmer beneath your feet. Look up, and there’s a forest of illuminated buildings on every side; look down, and the water mirrors that same light back. The sound of paddling, mixed with distant laughter, makes the place feel even more like something out of a dream.

You don’t have to get out on the water to enjoy it. Simply walking the paths that wind between the lawns and trees is more than enough to make this night feel special. Along the way, a cruise boat departing from the West Boathouse quietly slices through the water, and the sculptures lining the path stand under their own individual lighting, like pieces in a small open-air gallery.

Behind G-Tower, home to the Incheon Free Economic Zone Authority, lies Canal Walk, a street mall lined with cafés and shops along a central waterway. Styled after a European street and themed around the four seasons, its fountains still shoot up at night, and the shops glow under their own lights.

Leaving that street behind, we head up to a free observation deck. Looking down at all these lights spread out below, it’s hard to believe that the narrow, red-toned alleys walked earlier in the day and the sleek, dazzling high-tech city now stretched out underfoot belong to the same city. These are, without question, two entirely different landscapes, born more than a century apart. And yet something links them. Like the alleys that endured hard times and came back to life in colors all their own, and like this place—a new city born on what was once empty sea—Incheon has always managed to create more than what it was given. Having met both of its faces in a single day, it’s hard not to wonder what face this city will wear next.