Inside the Lowline: The Technology Behind NYC's First Underground Park

The Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal under Delancey Street has been abandoned since 1948, but thanks to a handful of creative scientists and researchers, it's going to be converted into the world's first underground park within the next five years — the Lowline.

The Lowline will be a public space for people to hang out in and for plants to grow ... and it's all underground. The trolley terminal it is set to replace is around 60,000 square feet underneath Delancey Street between Clinton and Norfolk streets.

To understand how the science behind getting sunlight underground works, Patch went to the Lowline's lab on 140 Essex St., a nonprofit that's been trying out the science of getting sunlight underground for the past eight years.

The Lowline lab is a dark, museum-like room, but what's really jarring about it is it has 50 species of plants growing within it as if it were your average greenhouse. There were pineapples, mint, strawberry plants and thousands of others.

Our Patch reporter looked for a skylight that would have allowed sunlight to come through the ceiling to the plants, but there was no such thing. Instead, there were solar reflectors on the roof tracking the sun all day and directing it through an intricate system of mirrors and tubes into the building, Lowline lab's co-founder Dan Barasch explained to Patch.

"The Lowline was borne out of a vision," Barasch said. "James Ramsey, my partner, is a former NASA engineer, and he played with light in a way so that you can treat it as a liquid and deliver it underground."

Around the time Ramsey was working on that scientific concept, he discovered the abandoned trolley terminal near the office where he worked and put the two ideas together.

Now that city officials are officially behind the Lowline's construction, Barasch predicts it will be up and running within the next five years. The Lowline nonprofit has to raise $10 million in the next year for it to be built, according to city requirements. So far donations have come from corporations, private individual donors and the City Council, according to Barasch.

The solar technology used in the Lowline has some pretty widespread implications for the future of many different public institutions. It's a technology that basically anywhere without access to outdoor light can use.

"Hospitals, schools, prisons, mines, anywhere people go that you can't get access to the sky, this solar technology can be used," Barasch said.

And New York City gets to set the trend.

Header image from City of New York Economic Development Corporation. All other images by Sarah Kaufman/Patch