Richard Choi spent nearly 37 years waking up at 3 a.m. to make it to Radio Korea in time to give the morning broadcast.
For years, Choi’s commute to the station on Wilshire Boulevard took only a few minutes from his home near Hancock Park, but when the station moved its main operations to La Palma in Orange County last year, he would have needed to wake up an hour earlier to make the drive.
“That just wasn’t realistic,” Choi said. “So I decided it was time to retire. If the office had stayed in Koreatown, I probably would have continued broadcasting.”
The move hasn’t sat well with some longtime listeners and former employees who saw the station as inseparable from Koreatown.
Choi, 78, added that several longtime employees left the news outlet rather than make the commute to Orange County.
By the time he retired last year, Choi was one of the station’s most recognizable voices, particularly during the 1992 LA civil unrest, when Korean immigrants across the city turned to Korean-language radio for updates and information.
When management first floated the idea of leaving Koreatown, Choi told them to reconsider.
The station’s headquarters became such a fixture in the neighborhood that many in the Korean-speaking community referred to 3700 Wilshire Blvd as the “Radio Korea building,” and the area in front of it, the “Radio Korea lawn.”
Now, the large Radio Korea sign in big, white block letters are gone, with just a shadow of an imprint.
The company spent years searching for another space in Koreatown after landlord Jamison Properties notified tenants in the Wilshire building that they would eventually need to vacate, Radio Korea CEO Michael Kim said.
The developers plan to redevelop the commercial space into affordable housing.
Radio Korea looked at multiple sites, including one near Hancock Park, but repeatedly ran into issues involving parking and cost.
“We wanted to stay in LA. We really tried hard to stay, because of 1992 and all that,” Kim said. “If Jamison was going to renew our lease, we would’ve stayed.”
He admitted, though, that he also believes the center of Southern California’s Korean community has been gradually shifting beyond LA.
“I understand how people in LA might feel about this stuff,” Kim said. “But I noticed Koreatown was starting to become less and less Korean, and I started thinking, ‘Is Koreatown going to die?’ I certainly hope not, but what if it ends up like Chinatown, where all the Chinese people moved to the San Gabriel Valley?”
“We had to move. There is a good Korean community here,” he added.
Radio Korea still operates a small satellite office in Koreatown, and Kim insists its reporting in LA remains the same.
“We’re not trying to abandon LA,” he said. “The only difference is that we are broadcasting from Orange County and not Los Angeles.”
The station’s role in 1992
For many Korean Americans, it is almost impossible to talk about Radio Korea without also talking about the 1992 unrest. The station became a critical source of information as chaos spread through Koreatown after the acquittal of the Los Angeles Police Department officers filmed beating Rodney King.
More than 2,000 Korean-owned businesses were damaged or destroyed during the unrest, according to some community estimates cited in the years since.
“Radio Korea played a major role in helping the Korean community rebuild,” Choi said, “and the riots became the turning point that transformed the Korean community into true Korean Americans. Before that, people came here chasing the vague idea of the ‘American Dream.’ People suffered and worked endlessly, but after the riots, they realized that the lives they had been living in America were not truly immigrant lives in the full sense.”
At the time, many Korean immigrants spoke limited English and relied heavily on Korean-language media for information. The radio station became an emergency information network as Koreatown residents felt left without police protection during the unrest.
Choi and other broadcasters remained on air through the night taking calls from neighbors reporting everything unfolding across the city.
Younger staff members leaned on Choi, who had already spent nearly two decades living in LA by then. According to station accounts, Choi sometimes stayed on air for more than 20 hours a day during the height of the unrest.
Yong-ho Kim started working in Radio Korea’s advertising department a month after immigrating to the United States in February 1990, two years before the unrest. That time still remains vivid in his memory.
“My oldest child was only two years old,” Kim said. “I heard helicopters overhead, saw fires everywhere, heard looting and gunshots through the night. I was terrified.”
He remained hunkered down at the station for several days, which at the time operated out of a building near Alvarado Street and Olympic Boulevard.
The advertising department was removed from the station’s editorial side, but he said everyone at Radio Korea pitched in during the unrest. He eventually left the station and went into the restaurant business, opening Arado Japanese Restaurant in 1995.
“Radio Korea was my first real job in America. At the time, I didn’t speak English well, didn’t fully understand the culture, and they still gave me an opportunity,” he said. “That experience shaped my business career afterward. Even now, I feel like Radio Korea runs through my blood. I love that station deeply.”
Kim admitted he misses the in-person interaction at the station.
“In the past, when I recorded radio ads for my restaurant, I would go directly into the studio,” he said. “Now everything gets sent by phone.”
He added LA remains the “emotional center” of Korean American life, even as more Korean families move to Orange County and other suburbs.
“That’s why there’s an attachment to keeping Korean-language media rooted in Koreatown,” he said.
Radio Korea leaves Koreatown
Jamison, the largest commercial office landlord in Koreatown and one of the neighborhood’s most prolific developers, declined to comment on several questions related to the future of the Wilshire building where Radio Korea called home. It’s unclear when the company notified tenants on when they would need to leave or the timeline for the planned residential conversion.
Radio Korea ultimately purchased a building in La Palma, where Kim said expenses were lower at a difficult moment for Korean-language media outlets already dealing with declining advertising revenue and lingering financial struggles following the pandemic.
The move is a bittersweet moment for the Korean community.
Hyepin Im was a graduate student at the University of Southern California during the unrest in 1992. The destruction in Koreatown and the experience of watching Korean American business owners struggle in its aftermath helped shape her later work in community advocacy.
Ethnic media organizations depend heavily on physical relationships inside the communities they serve, Im said.
“The fact that they were here in 1992 made a difference,” Im said. “I think the lack of their presence here will be a loss to the community.”
Im, whose nonprofit work with Faith and Community Empowerment has focused for decades on immigrant and underserved communities in LA, argued that LA still carries unique weight within Korean communities nationally, even as Korean populations continue growing in Orange County and elsewhere.
“I could recognize that perhaps in Orange County, some of the things that I could see why they may choose there is a lot more Korean leadership in politics,” she said. “And as such, just like the Chinese community moved to the San Gabriel Valley from Chinatown, perhaps there is going to be a shift that is happening.”
“I think proximity is always important and I would say it’s still what happens in LA that impacts the rest of the country, especially the Korean community,” she added.
For Choi, Koreatown is inseparable from Radio Korea and the station’s role during the unrest, which pushed many Korean immigrants to engage more deeply with American civic and political life.
“No matter how many Koreans move to Orange County,” Choi said, “the symbolic center of the Korean community is still Koreatown.”
