The dump that is no more

In June of 2006, a nameless soi that never officially existed disappeared as the city went through a clean and green phase in honor of HM the King’s 60th year on the throne. According to our old-hand sources, the small alley began life as a “crappy little tourist market built on wooden planks that used to rattle around when the trains passed” in the 80s;

with the open-air hostess beer bars it became known as Buckskin Joe’s or Soi Buckskin, and then Soi Zero until it was shut down and cordoned off with the little white fence you can still see today. Bare, dingy, stuck between an expressway and a railway, without air-con, it was a cheap dirty place to get B50 beers without the “you buy me cola?” kind of pressure exerted further down on Sukhumvit. There was a bit of “market” action at the mouth of the soi, but nothing much. It attracted a fair number of US servicemen and other US government employees, as well as, later, a sizeable Aussie and Kiwi contingent. Bars were raised to avoid flooding, which happened anyway, and the wooden floorboards would creak and bow under the weight of the punters walking them or even skipping about to avoid the treacherous waters below. As a kind of pitch-black underbelly of Bangkok’s dark underbelly, some now credit Soi Zero with a kind of lost trashy appeal.