The world beneath the city is often portrayed in movies as a dark, sinister place with a criminal element and some marginalized segment of society in hiding and fighting to survive.
But one group believes it can bring sunlight and vibrance underground to a one-acre space below a busy neighborhood in New York City.
The Lowline is a proposed subterranean park that would occupy an old trolley station beneath Delancey Street on the city’s Lower East Side. It would use solar technology to not only light and power the park but create the necessary wavelengths that would allow plants and trees to grow.
Photo: Lowline
The project received some initial funding on Kickstarter in 2012 and is now back on the crowd-funding site to raise an additional $200,000 to complete the park. The park is expected to cost about $60,000 in mostly private funds.
Just 14 percent of the land in New York City is devoted to green or open spaces and the particularly crowded Lower East Side scores poorly for New York City neighborhoods on the amount of green and natural surface it has within its parks, according to an Open Space Index report.
To light the park, builders will create a remote skylight, which will gather and reflect sunlight and direct it underground through fiber optic cables that will distribute the concentrated light in domes. The technology, designed by co-founder and former NASA engineer James Ramsey, was tested in 2012 at an abandoned warehouse for an exhibit to raise support for the Lowline project.
“We’re simply taking over a space no one was using in a densely populated neighborhood that lacks sufficient public space,” project co-founder Dan Barasch told the Associated Press last year.
New Yorkers have been forced to find creative ways to create space. The Lowline will complement Manhattan’s High Line park, a 22-block walkway of flowers and trees on an abandoned freight route.
Planners of the Lowline are working with the Metro Transportation Authority, which leases the former terminal to the city, to get approval for using the space. The trolley station first opened in 1908. It closed in 1948 and has since been used for storage.
The underground park could open by 2018.
