Before Building an Underground Park, the Lowline Aims to Make One in a Warehouse

The idea's simple enough: take the sunlight and push it somewhere else! Sometimes applying emerging technology feels like slapping a five-year-old's logic to extremely basic problems—in this case, bringing solar power to an underground park.

But for the Lowline team, which has been pushing to bring an underground nature park to an abandoned train station underneath Delancey Street in New York's Lower East Side, that dream's still alive and moving forward in small steps.

Watch Motherboard's 2012 video about the project.

The team is moving ahead with funding an indoor test run, called the Lowline Lab, via Kickstarter. At the time of writing, the campaign's made a bit over $56,000 of its $200,000 goal with 21 days left. This isn't their first Kickstarter campaign; the team pulled together $155,186 in the first one, which launched in February 2012 and helped fund a full-sized exhibition near the site.

The company has already rented out space in a dark and vacant market building on Essex Street in the Lower East Side that it will use to simulate the proposed park. The Kickstarter will help fund projects lasting for six months between September 2015 and February 2016 aimed at helping develop the park, including testing the effectiveness of the solar technology the group is sourcing from South Korea, how plants will thrive underground, and how receptive audiences will be to the project during the rougher months of the year.

"We believe that New Yorkers need a public space that is beautiful and available all year round—not just the 4-5 months a year when the weather is nice enough to spend time outdoors," Lowline director of community Robyn Shapiro told me.

In the meanwhile, it'll be free and open to the public on weekends. The space will be used during the weekdays for events, speakers, and its Young Designers program, which Shapiro said will invite some 1,000+ youth to help design the space according to the needs of its stakeholders: those who live in the Lower East Side.

"Everything that we learn during the months that we're open will be rolled up in a report that we'll take directly to the MTA and city officials to help apply pressure for us to gain official access to the Lowline site and to highlight its urgent need in one of the least green areas of the city," Shapiro said.

If anything, the project has garnered support from a number of large names. Its board of advisors includes Lena Dunham; Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame; and Robert Hammond and Joshua David, both co-creators of the High Line, the above-ground sister project, to name a few. It's also attracted support from several council members, New York senators and members of Congress.

And while Shapiro didn't explicitly mention what recourse the team would have if they didn't meet the Kickstarter goal, they're bound to make it if they keep going at the rate they're going.