Over 30 years after construction largely stopped on North Korea’s 105-story Ryugyong Hotel, the central Pyongyang neighborhood surrounding the empty building dubbed the “hotel of doom” is being transformed into the city’s latest cluster of concrete high-rises. 

NK News has obtained exclusive photos of the new apartment towers taken this summer that offer an unfiltered street level view of imperfectly hand-sculpted concrete facades and scant safety measures on construction sites — scenes that North Korean authorities work hard to hide from the outside world. 

Though most of the new high-rises that appear in the photos are part of a coordinated