If you’re in N.Y.C. and have a free hour this weekend, head to the Lower East Side for “Imagining the Lowline,” a visionary exhibit in an abandoned warehouse on Essex and Broome. The exhibit is really just an amuse-bouche, a showcase for the real thing: it’s there to help you imagine what it might be like to step into the world’s first underground park.
How? Well, the idea is simple, if also complicated: new technology makes it possible for us to gather light and funnel it underground. And while New York City may be short on land, it has an abundance of underground space that’s not being used by the city’s transit authority, the M.T.A. (If you’ve spent any time on the subway, you’ve surely had the delirious experience of staring out a dark window only to be surprised by a renegade art project in an abandoned station—a graffiti mural, say, that shifts and moves as you hurtle by.) The Lowline concept, developed by Dan Barasch (formerly of PopTech) and James Ramsey of RAAD Studio, is to take one of the M.T.A.’s abandoned stations—the old Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal, which opened in 1903 and closed in 1948, after streetcars stopped running—and turn it into a public park.
Step into the dark back room of “Imagining the Lowline”—past the informative wall texts—and you will suddenly feel like Alice in Wonderland looking around after her long fall into the depths of the earth. There, inside the cavernous warehouse and sustained by light cells out of “Star Trek,” is a mossy knoll, complete with a Japanese maple and a praying mantis (which Barasch and Ramsey have dubbed “Zoltan”). The scale of the knoll and the voluminous darkness combine to make you feel like you’ve downed a vial labeled “DRINK ME”; it’s probably the closest you’ll come to knowing what it feels like to have been turned into a giant. Peering down at the mosses and roots and gnarled bits, you half-imagine seeing Lilliputian humans setting out with their dogs or Frisbees.
The light, which looks like a hybrid of fluorescence and natural sunlight, changes as you watch. You can hear cars rushing past outside. The collision between the manmade and the “natural” is more dizzying than you’d expect, like waking in a dream only to realize you’re still dreaming. The solar canopy—the silver dome that stands over the greenery and draws light down into it—was designed and fabricated by RAAD Studio, along with a team of engineers. It involves futuristic (only it turns out to be present-day) technology including “helio tubes” and “solar collection dishes” that will channel sunlight below the surface of the earth, as well as anodized-aluminum panels that have been hand-pieced together.
The exhibit also gives the viewer all the less glamorous nitty-gritty. The trolley station that the Lowline would occupy has been neglected for some sixty years. But, according to wall text, it “retains some incredible features, like remnant cobblestones, crisscrossing rail tracks and vaulted ceilings.”
How likely is it that the Lowline will come to pass? That depends to some degree on you, dear reader. One of the primary challenges, Barasch explained, is that the road toward a final decision about an abandoned public site is never a straight one, since coming to consensus involves many different levels of bureaucracy. Right now, he and Ramsey are trying to make the case to both the M.T.A. and the city (and the state, ultimately) that a public park would become a hub for neighborhood commerce, much as the Highline did. And, as you might expect, it’s not cheap to build an underground park. So public support is crucial. Hence the exhibit: it’s one way for Barasch and Ramsey to spread the word, drum up public (and political) support for the proposal, and get the Lower East Side business community involved.
The appeal of an underground park is pretty clear: it’s got a sci-fi neato factor, and for the melancholics out there, it would serve as a kind of Hadean companion to the sunny Highline. At a fundraiser for the project held last week, the actor Adrian Grenier stopped in between fashion-week events, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, who is the councilman for the district, gave his support to the project.
The exhibit is on view through the 27th of September. Last Sunday, Barasch was there, eagerly explaining the project to visitors, and directing them to the food and coffee stands. There were café tables and chocolate treats and robust ham sandwiches all to be savored in the shrouded darkness. For a moment, it seemed obvious why the Lowline needs to exist. It’s just the place for a Sunday stroll when you’ve indulged a bit too much the night before: it’s equipped with plenty of mossy greenery, and zero piercing sunlight.
Image courtesy of RAAD.
