The Highs and Lows of NYC (Part 1)

New York City is a city of innumerable contrasts.

One category of contrast is the actual height and depth of New York City.  From the tips of the tallest skyscrapers to the caverns of the deepest train and water tunnels, NYC is always pushing its limits to accommodate so many people occupying so little space.

This series will touch on some of those highs and lows, starting with a low, that promises to be a high point in the future.

The Lowline:  Many people have heard of the Highline, a former elevated railroad on the West Side converted to an aboveground park.  Fewer people have heard of the Lowline, billed as the world's first underground park.  The Lowline is still in development but it promises to revitalize a long-dormant space under the Lower East Side.  Perhaps we should call it the Still Lower East Side?.    

The Lowline will occupy a cavernous abandoned underground trolley yard at Delancey and Essex Streets in the Lower East Side.

The trolley station in the past

The trolleys operated for more than a half century and moved workers, shoppers, and the like between Brooklyn and Manhattan across the Williamsburg Bridge.  One goal was to relieve chronic overcrowding in the Lower East Side, once the most densely populated place on Earth.

• Pop Quiz:  What do the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Lowline have in common?  Answer:  Trolley cars.  The baseball team, then based in Brooklyn, was unofficially nicknamed the Trolley Dodgers or Dodgers because Brooklyn residents were known as Trolley Dodgers.  There were so many trolley lines operating in Brooklyn that locals had to be skilled at dodging the trolley cars or risk injury or death.  The team officially adopted the name Dodgers in 1932  26 years later they dodged Brooklyn for Los Angeles.

With the rise of subways and automobiles, the tolley lines and yard were abandoned following World War II.

Fast forward to this century.  Following the early success of the elevated park known as the Highline, a team is seeking to mirror that success underground, utilizing existing spaces to create underground parks in New York and beyond.

The challenges are many: lighting for park visitors, lighting to foster plant growth, accessibility, sustainability, security, ventilation, electricity and water supply, sanitation, funding, not to mention rats.  (To be fair, the Highline probably has its share of rats.)  

While the challenges are many, the Lowline team is already creating solutions and has opened a Lowline Lab in a nearby warehouse to demonstrate some of the solutions . We recently visited.

The Lowline Lab.  Note the live plants, reflective ceiling and light flooding the space.  Most of the light is "piped" into the space from collectors on the roof.  The light is very bright.

Some random hottie at the Lowline Lab.

In the future, the trolley station after conversion to the Lowline

New York Magazine has a slide show that is worth viewing.  Click on the photo below.

For a video tour of the abandoned trolley station, click here.

To learn more about the Lowline, click here.

See you underground.