North Korea in the midst of a mysterious building boom

By the dizzying standards of Asia's exploding mega-cities, the construction here is nothing you could call a real estate boom. But it is a remarkable -- and somewhat mysterious -- development in a city that looks like it was frozen in time, with its Stalinist slabs of concrete from the 1950s and '60s.

Except for the monuments glorifying leader Kim Jong Il and his father, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, hardly anything new has gone up in decades. By night, the city is so quiet you can hear a baby crying from far across the Taedong River, which cuts through the center of town.

Yet these days, high-rise apartments in shades of pink are taking shape near the Pueblo, the American spy ship captured in 1968 and still anchored in the river. A tangle of construction cranes juts into the skyline near Pothong Gate, a re-creation of the old city wall. About 100,000 units are to be built over the next four years.

A modernistic silver-sided box of a conference center is already complete. Theaters and hotels are being renovated. Streets have been repaved and buildings repainted.

Even North Korea's most notorious clunker, an unfinished 105-story hotel that looms vacant over the city, is under construction again after sitting idle for nearly two decades.

All are slated for completion by 2012, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung. The deadline appears to have taken on new urgency for the appearance-conscious North Koreans, who fret that their capital has become a laughingstock.

"We know we need to modernize. We want to make the city comfortable for the people who live here and for tourists," said Choe Jong Hun, an official with the Committee for Cultural Relations With Foreign Countries.

Economic free fall

What is mysterious is that North Korea appears to be as broke as ever. The country's economy went into a free fall in the early 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and other communist allies, and it has barely recovered. The United Nations' World Food Program is warning that the country could be careening toward a famine similar to that of the mid-1990s, in which as many as 2 million people died.