Posted on 05/24/2015 4:57:38 PM PDT by 9thLife
Long stretches of densely packed tenement buildings still line the concrete streets of the Lower East Side, standing as living artefacts of its 19th- and 20th-century immigrant past. Bathtubs sit in renovated kitchens and floor-to-ceiling windows look out on to brick walls in elegant attempts to mask the neighbourhood’s cramped topography. This tension courses down Clinton Street, where some of the city’s best restaurants now occupy narrow storefronts that once sold pickled herring from barrels.
“There’s so much cultural resonance there, but it’s a part of the city that’s bereft of public space, landmarks or any civic attention,” the architect James Ramsey says of his former neighbourhood. Next to Clinton, the unusually wide Delancey Street is one of the most chaotic thoroughfares in the city — yet the potential for tranquillity lies hidden beneath. “It is a dead zone now, like that pocket in the Gulf of Mexico where the only thing that could survive is jellyfish, but the street is basically hollow,” Ramsey explains excitedly of the space that holds his dream for a natural underground refuge called the Lowline.
The one-acre subterranean site is the former Williamsburg Trolley Terminal; it has been defunct since 1948 and can be seen in the distance from the platform of the Essex Street JMZ subway stop. “The trolleys would come across the Williamsburg bridge when it was freshly built, turn around and drop people off. Because of that, you have this enormous cavernous space.” Remnants of cobblestones and 20ft vaulted ceilings further distinguish it from other underground spaces Ramsey discovered in 2008, when business at his company Raad Studio was slow and his restlessness (along with the guidance of a retired city transport worker) propelled him to explore.
“I was hunting around the city, looking at all the New York artefacts that are underfoot. We don’t tend to celebrate it so much, but it’s all there if you know where to look. There’s a tunnel under Pell St, where bootleggers used to keep whiskey and murder people, basically.”
Ramsey, who cut his teeth “pushing paper” as a satellite engineer at Nasa after studying cathedral design in Europe on a Bates Fellowship from Yale University, rarely has just one thought at a time. While in India for a friend’s wedding, he started to wonder if daylight could be transformed from a fixed resource into something more portable. “The idea that you can deliver sunlight to all kinds of places where you couldn’t get it before has been a central issue in architecture since Egyptian times.” If sunlight can be moved, then why not the plants, too?
An artist’s representation of the Lowline, which will use solar technology to channel natural daylight into the park, allowing plants and trees to grow©Kibum Park/Raad Designs
An artist’s representation of the Lowline, which will use solar technology to channel natural daylight into the park, allowing plants and trees to grow In that moment of thought, all these lost subterranean spaces he had been wandering through suddenly became prized pieces of real estate, and the Lowline (first called the Delancey Underground) was born. The “remote skylights”, developed in partnership with Sunportal, based in South Korea, use fibre-optic cables to draw light underground into “helio tubes” that filter into domes. The domes in turn reflect the light, magnifying its output and distributing it throughout the space. This “almost science-fiction concept” came to life after Ramsey and the project’s co-founder, Dan Barasch, raised $155,000 through the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in 2012; they built a proof-of-concept prototype in a blackened warehouse with a single tree and 11,000 people came to see it.
The Lowline’s biggest obstacle is navigating a maze of city and state bureaucracy. “The hard part is — because this hasn’t existed before — there isn’t a template for it execution-wise or governmentally. All of a sudden, we’re in a strange territory legally where we can’t call ourselves a park,” Ramsey explains. That’s because, for the city government, a park must be “open to the sky — and technically speaking we’re not”.
Whether the world’s first underground park can actually be called a park is a Kafkaesque question that will need to wait. While the city owns the site, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority holds the master lease and obtaining that is the next step.
“That’s the flashpoint that enables us to do actual funding for the construction,” says Ramsey. He aims to have the lease by this time next year, with an opening date projected for 2018.
In the meantime, they are building the “Lowline Lab” this summer on nearby Essex Street; this research and exhibition centre will open to the public in September. “We’re taking over a warehouse and installing three remote skylights and getting our hands dirty with horticultural experiments. We’re doing it to show that it’s not a magic trick.” The renderings feel like a portal to the future, transforming our ideas of viable space.
As the project comes closer to realisation, the potential for global applications looms large. “We did a proposal and were pretty deep in talking with developers of London’s new Crossrail system, but it fell apart for one reason or another,” Ramsey says. “I think their project was too far along for it to be feasible.” Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, also visited his office to talk about a new civic green space for the city.
Ramsey lists “jails, hospitals, deep office interiors” as other possibilities for the “remote skylights”. “Look at a place like Hong Kong, where they’ve completely run out of room. They’re starting to drill into the mountains to get some square footage from there. This is a pretty good idea if you have to do that.”
CHUD Begins
Reminded of The Lord of the Word, circa 1907.
Lower east side now is basically one huge nest of Occupy wall street trust fund hipsters. “Wall street is evil, thank you daddy for my trust fund”.
The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is officially the world's oldest subway tunnel. This tunnel was built in 1844 beneath a busy street in the City of Brooklyn (Brooklyn did not become part of NYC until a half-century later). The Atlantic Avenue Tunnel is a half-mile long and accommodated two standard gauge railroad tracks.
I’ve been in the Atlantic Avenue one. It runs all the way from the harbor to Flatbush Ave, but most of it was filled in with rubble long ago.
http://forestiere-historicalcenter.com/
Underground Gardens in Fresno, CA
It’s said that the builder brought the idea from Sicily.
I guess it’s handy to know of such places.
FORESTIERE preferred his cool underground lifestyle to that lived by most people of his time—above ground in hot, wooden, “sweat boxes.” His unique home included a parlor with fireplace, a summer and a winter bedroom, a courtyard with a bath and a fish pond, and a kitchen with all the conveniences of his era. This earthen home was his friend and protector from all types of inclement weather.
IT HAS been said that “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Every twist and turn through- out this delightful underground maze brings a new beauty to behold. The stonework, the scallop-shaped seats carved into the walls and passageways, and the lush greenery of trees and grapevines growing beneath the ground proclaim Forestiere’s love for life, nature, and the divine Creator of it all.
ESCAPING the intense Fresno heat is as easy as descending a flight of stairs. Step down into the cool, welcoming arms of nature-shaded rooms and courtyards. Amazingly, the underground climates here (micro-climates) change depending on the location. Temperatures can range anywhere from 10 to 30 degrees lower than above ground, or just a couple of degrees from one spot to another. This photo shows a citrus tree (once bearing 7 varieties of citrus) growing at a second underground level (about 22 feet down). The different levels also affect the timing of tree blossom appearance and protect them from frost.
If climate change is soon to put the streets of New York under water, why are they building underground?
The interview suggests that the guy behind the project seems to have a pretty level head.
They will apply for hardship relief funding... on my dime, no doubt.
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