Gardening goes underground in Manhattan park project

You may have heard of New York’s High Line, the public park built on a 1.45km stretch of an old, disused freight railway line elevated above the streets of Manhattan, whose naturalistic Piet Oudolf-designed planting has captivated the public. But have you heard of plans for New York’s Lowline, an underground park the size of a football field that will sit on the site of an abandoned tram station in the heart of the Lower East side?

The project, the brainchild of architect and former Nasa inventor James Ramsey and his friend and business partner Dan Barasch, will use innovative solar collection dishes to harvest sunshine and then distribute it below the city’s footpaths via fibre-optic cables.

Solar domes will disperse and modulate the light throughout the underground space, providing sunlight intense enough to support the process of photosynthesis, enabling a variety of plants to grow.

The result will be an urban park like no other, a tranquil, subterranean garden in a heavily developed area of New York city that suffers from a dearth of conventional public green spaces.

At present the idea is just that, until it receives official approval from the city’s planners and the necessary private funding, estimated to be somewhere in the region of $70-$80 million (€62-€70 million). But in 2012 a remarkably successful Kickstarter campaign raised more than €155,000 from 3,300 supporters from around the world, allowing the project’s inventors to commission a series of planning studies which provided ample evidence that the world’s first underground park could become a reality.

Further proof of concept has since come in the form of the Lowline Lab, which opened its doors to the public last October as a community space and laboratory/prototype exhibit where people can see the solar technology at work.

Situated on Essex Street, two blocks away from the site of the proposed underground park, it has proved such a hit with New Yorkers that the lab recently received a year-long extension from the city. Already its gardeners have managed to grow strawberries, saffron, miniature pineapples, herbs and other edibles as well as a host of ornamental plants such as ferns, bromeliads and ornamental grasses.

The people behind the project are now in the process of completing negotiations with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the city to build the underground park, with the aim of completing its construction by 2020.

In the meantime, the Lowline has already won the support of the world's design community, as well as some heavyweight endorsement in the shape of Time magazine, which included it in its list of the 25 best inventions of 2015.

See thelowline.org