There’s another city of sorts beneath New York – underground. By harnessing the power of the sun using some clever technology, the world’s first underground park may spring up below the city’s streets.
Opened in 1908, the Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal below Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was abandoned 40 years later. Even though it has been neglected for so long, it is still structurally sound.
The Lowline project aims to reclaim this unused space for public good, in the form of a park.
But in order for plants to survive, they need sunlight. The Lowline team have been tinkering with a system to reflect sunlight from a distributor dish underground and in 2012 built a full scale prototype of the technology in an abandoned warehouse in the Lower East Side.
The concept involves a series of reflective parabolic dishes set on a trackers collecting the sunlight, which is transmitted through a fiber-optic cable to a dome that reflects and distributes the channeled sunlight onto the area below.
The team believes the system has the potential to reflect so much light that many different plant species will be able to survive and a botanical garden right in the middle of New York City can be created.
The next stage of the project will see the installation of three solar collection systems on the roof of an abandoned former warehouse space. These will be connected to a tube-based distribution system and a 12 metre wide canopy inside the building.
“This research will be critical to our understanding of how much light can be gathered and filtered into the actual Lowline,” says the Lowline team. “And since we’ll conduct tests for six months, from September 2015- February 2016, we’ll see how this technology works in the fall and the winter.”
To build the “Lowline Lab”, USD$200,000 is required and a KickStarter crowdfunding project has been set up to raise the cash. At the time of writing, nearly $93,000 had been raised from more than a thousand backers, with 15 days to go in the campaign.
“We envision not merely a new public space, but an innovative display of how technology can transform our cities in the 21st century. And along the way, we intend to draw the community into the design process itself, empowering a new generation of Lower East Siders to help build a new bright spot in our dense urban environment.”
Another attraction below ground that utilises reflected sunlight is Australia’s Capricorn Caves.
