LowLine: An Underground Park on NYC's Lower East Side

A few years ago, Dan Barasch and James Ramsey discovered an abandoned trolley terminal from 1903 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—and they decided to build an underground park. 

Called ‘Delancey Underground’ or ‘LowLine’ (as in an underground ‘The High Line’ park for the Lower East Side), the first underground park of New York will use a system of fiber optic cables to gather and transfer sunlight from above the ground, to the ceilings below the ground. 


The cables will help disperse, and support the growth and photosynthesis of plants and trees. 
According to Barasch and Ramsey, the light carried through the cables will have the necessary wavelengths to support photosynthesis—while blocking out harmful UV rays that cause sunburn. 


The Delancey Underground will be 60,000 square-feet (1.5 acres) large, and 20-feet high, and contain the strong steel columns from the terminal abandoned in 1948. 
It will be a public space all year round—where rain, and the cold of winter can’t get to its visitors. 


The Kickstarter fundraising for the project was a success, and a pre-test was launched. 


Now, we wait for the construction of Delancey Underground to be complete.