The success of New York’s High Line park has inspired urban
planners around the globe to refashion unused infrastructure
into soaring parks. And now, it has inspired something close to
its opposite: The LowLine, an underground park whose fundraising
drive is kicking off today on Kickstarter. If successful, it
might eventually become the most massive project ever begun by
the crowd-funding website. For now, the visionaries behind the
LowLine are hoping to raise $100,000 to create mock-ups of their
technology that will bring natural light into the space. That
technology was conceived by the LowLine’s founders, Dan Barasch
and James Ramsey, and would use fiber optic cables to fill the
subterranean space with natural light and living plants. The
proposed site is an unused and long neglected 13-acre former
subway stop on Delancey Street, built in 1903 in New York’s
Lower East Side. While they imagine the park serving the local
community it is found in, they also imagine this park becoming a
model for the reappropr