New York City already has the High Line — a near-1.5 mile stretch running from New York City's Meatpacking District through Chelsea and to the West Side Yard.
Now, New Yorkers may need to make room for The Lowline, the world's first underground solar-powered park. That's the ambitious plan of The Lowline developers, who have pinpointed a 107-year-old abandoned trolley station — untouched for 67 years — in the middle of NYC's Lower East Side as the projected space for the underground park. They have already received $24,796 of their $200,000 goal, with 28 days left on their Kickstarter page, as of Wednesday afternoon.
"The core feature of The Lowline is that we can take natural sunlight, send that underground and use it to grow stuff," says James Ramsey, the creator and of co-founder of The Lowline, on the project's Kickstarter page. "With this natural sunlight, we can take an abandoned trolley terminal, which is a football field-sized piece of New York City history, and transform it into a vibrant public space filled with plants and trees and to create something unlike the world has ever seen before."
Added co-founder and executive director of The Lowline, Dan Barasch: "The Lowline is more than a cool idea. It's a plan to revitalize and enhance an entire neighborhood."
The project's developers plan on using concentrators to funnel sunlight from sidewalks into tracking collectors and irrigators, which will transfer the sunlight underground into different parts of The Lowline. They also plan on conducting tests from September 2015 through February 2016 to see how this solar technology works during the fall and winter. If all goes as planned, developers hope to have all negotiations with the City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) completed over the next two years, with The Lowline opening to the public in 2018.
Sounds pretty amazing, right? Now, let's see if The Lowline becomes a reality.
