I first heard about the project called The Delancey Underground (also nicknamed the Low Line) when I was browsing TimeOut New York in search of something fun to do several weekends back. When I got a glimpse of the project’s renderings filled with walking, dancing and sitting scalies I immediately thought this space had already come into existence. The Low Line is to be an underground public park in the lower east side inside of a former trolley terminal. Imagine the High Line 20 feet underground. Solar technology would allow for natural illumination, and, even better-grass and flowers. The project was proposed by architect James Ramsey (principal of RAAD), tech expert Dan Barasch of tech thinktank, PopTech, and money manager R. Boykin Curry VI. The detail and elaborate design of the space seemed so alluring that I could hardly believe this project hadn’t even begun to take off. After getting over the initial disappointment of the Low Line’s lack of reality, I discovered that a small art gallery in the Lower East Side was showcasing an exhibit on the proposed project.
The Mark Miller Gallery is located just a few blocks from Delancey street, above where a massive unused former trolley terminal sits and waits. The gallery is a small, clean, open space, with no ornament or intricate structural design to distract visitors from what is displayed on the walls. The Low Line exhibit, “Let There Be Light,” took up the whole of the gallery, further drawing a visitor’s interest and focus into the project.
The exhibit focused on three phases of the Low Line’s existence: present, production, and the finalized future. On the first floor, Mr. Miller set up several of the most striking images in the exhibit. The architectural renderings of the Low Line in themselves look fantastical. Perhaps it is the Alice and Wonderland-esque feel of the gigantic mushroom-like structures supported by steel beams. The mixture of green and metal seem futuristic, but is also reminiscent of the High Line’s industrial park feel. The developers want to rename and redefine the space, not completely destroy it. They want to remind visitors of the history of the place, the history of the city. They want to repurpose the underground from a space that has typically been “consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction” (as many underground transportation stations are) into a space experienced in a state of concentration (Benjamin).
The space the Low Line is aiming to occupy once was a Williamsburg trolley terminal that first opened in 1903 and was used for transporting passengers in streetcars from the Lower East Side to Wiliamsburg. The streetcar service was then discontinued in 1948, and for 64 years, the space has remained abandoned and unused, tucked away beneath Delancey Street.
The renderings show that the trolley station will be drastically transformed, but this repurposing will not wipe out what once was there. There are still remnants of cobblestone from the original trolley station, which will be restored and implemented into the Low Line’s finished vision. Vegetation will grow in a place that is currently dark and entirely composed of cement, but steel and metal will still remain in the Low Line, allowing the man-made materials of the city to mix with out-of-place but beautiful greenery.
The renderings bring to life a project that still has not fully gotten the green light (the MTA will not request proposals for the space until the end of the year), but convey astounding images to the viewer. The environment looks almost alien, but, thanks to the well-thought-out placement of an assortment of scalies, the space becomes something inhabitable. It’s hard not to see oneself in the image, whether it be the man in the suit lolling by the pond, or a happy couple walking down the cobblestone path underneath rays of natural sunlight. These little computer-generated figures really do “go along with an architect’s vision and let him or her make it a reality” as Rob Walker said in the New York Times. New York has such sparse amount of greenery, the idea of a park unique as this is truly thrilling, particularly one with a vision painted so clearly.
The Low Line will not just be a fashionable space and a secluded spot away from the fast pace of the city, but it will encourage the advancement of energy-saving technology, form a community for the underdeveloped LES, as well as create a space for creative, interactive exhibits. The developers have “rejected the spatial absolutes” in designing a shifting environment that instead embraces “the idea that space itself is a social product” (Shephard 23).
Descending the exhibit’s staircase, visitors leave the fantastical realm of the Low Line’s colorful renderings and are quite rudely awakened by the jarring pictures of what the Delancey’s 60,000 foot underground space truly looks like. The space is all cement and steel, covered with graffiti and rusty pipes. Even though the space has been in an abandoned state for decades, it still is the epitome of urbanity. A closed in area made entirely of metal and cement, bearing the wear and tear of long-term usage, and the unavoidable graffiti tags apparent in a majority of other underground, tucked away spaces.
These images bring the visitor back down to earth and highlight how ambitious of a project this really is. The High Line was able to create a modern outdoor space out of some rusty rail tracks, but the Low Line is creating a subterranean world with natural light, growing plants, and moderate temperatures year round. This project is redefining a space into something social, green, and filled with sunlight; three things that aren’t exactly prevalent in New York City public spaces.
Along with images of the worn and rusty abandoned trolley station, the exhibit’s basement hold sketches and blueprints for some of the Low Line’s enterprising technologies. The Low Line will possess solar collectors at street level that amass sunlight throughout the day, and then direct the sunlight below ground through fiber optic cables. The light emitted through the ground will not retain skin-harming ultra-violet rays (sorry, no tanning, girls), but will allow the necessary light needed for photosynthesis. Several completed solar light panels are displayed in the glass entrance window of the exhibit. The technology is sleek, silver and futuristic-looking, only adding on to the fantastical theme that seems to run through the exhibit’s first floor.
A simple blueprint for this technology demonstrates the more detailed thought process needed for developing these tools. Questions arise about natural ventilation, air filtering machines, and noise problems. A more complex blueprint of the solar technology reminds visitors that while this project is on such a grand scale, measurements and designs need to be created precisely and almost perfectly to make sure the project is a success.
Tucked away in the back corner of the exhibit, a simple, 3D video rendering of the space is played on a continuous loop. It isn’t the exquisite, detailed renderings of the first floor, but it helps the visitor to understand what it might be like to move through this space. The “camera” glides through the animation, developing an uncanny feel for what a combination steel-tree-rail atmosphere might feel like. Though the video is of basic, low quality graphics, it allows the visitors to get a better spatial understanding and ultimately creates, as Giuliana Bruno describes cinema, “modern cartography…a mobile map” (Bruno 2). It lets the “spectator [be a] voyager rather than a voyeur” (Bruno 1).
Perhaps the developers Ramsey and Barasch could even be seen as modern day Corbusiers, drawing together the mediums of technology and architecture to create something never experienced before. Corbusier was able to form “relationships between seemingly distant universes” as Ramsey and Barasch bring together seemingly disparate objects; a dank underground space, flora, and advanced technology (Cohen 17). Beatriz Colomina’s description of galleries is highly relevant to the Delancey Underground experience, as well, in that they both create “a cultural phenomenon and artistic product” (Colomina 219). The Low Line would bring a new sense of culture and community to the undervalued Lower East Side, as well as showcase a design completely unique to the whole of the city.
All in all, Let There Be Light did a fantastic job of drawing attention to the Delancey Underground project. The blown up versions of the renderings on the wall make visitors yearn for this multi-modal fantasy land just out of reach. Of course, there are still many questions that remain unanswered; will this project be approved by the MTA? How much money will they need? Will this technology be successful? Will the space be successful? As for now, the Low Line exists purely in renderings and in our imaginations, leaving me with probably the only time I ever wanted to be a scalie.
Sources Cited
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Giuliana Bruno, “Site-seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image” Wide Angle 19:4 (1997): 8-24.
Jean-Louis Cohen, Introduction to Toward an Architecture Trans. John Goodman (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007): 1-78
Beatriz Colomina, “Architectureproduction” In Kester Rattenbury, Ed., This Is Not Architecture: Media Constructions (New York: Routledge, 2002)
Rob Walker, “Go Figure” New York Times (February 4, 2011).
Other Resources
http://delanceyunderground.org/
http://www.boweryboogie.com/2012/04/ny1-discovers-delancey-underground-exhibit-on-orchard/
http://inhabitat.com/nyc/the-low-line-a-spectacular-two-acre-underground-park-to-be-constructed-in-nycs-lower-east-side/
http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2012/03/mta-seeks-proposals-for-seven-sites-but-not-the-low-line.html
http://nymag.com/news/intelligencer/the-low-line-2011-9/
