World’s first underground park grows at Essex Fair.....

Park lovers now have their own underground movement.

Welcome to The Lowline — the world’s first subterranean green space — which will sit one story below Delancey St.

The full park will eventually comprise three city blocks in an abandoned trolley terminal, but the first phase — the Lowline Lab — opens this weekend in the former Essex Fair Retail Market warehouse to test how the public will react to indoor green space and to show off solar technology that lights the space and supports 3,500 plants such as ferns and pineapples.

 

"I want people to come into this space ... and just to have a moment of transcendence where they can really imagine that they are in this alternate world," said co-founder James Ramsey who built the first phase with $225,000 he and co-founder Dan Barasch raised on Kickstarter. "It’s pretty surreal and maybe even a little bit psychedelic.”

The pair hopes to finish the full park by 2020 — and spend between $60 and $75 million.

That exorbitant range stems partly from the challenge of building a Washington Square Park in a place where even Washington never slept.

To make the Lowline a desirable park, Ramsey, a former NASA engineer, built an innovative solar system that funnels light from the real world through a series of tubes and pipes and magnifies it to an intensity 30 times that of regular sunlight.

"We channel it through (what is) essentially plumbing until we get it to the place we want to put it," explained Ramsey.

 

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand likened the project to The Highline, which repurposed an abandoned elevated freight train track and turned it into a green ribbon from the West Village to the West 30s.

"(It's a) creative reuse of subterranean infrastructure (that will) lead the way towards a better more livable city," Gillibrand said during a conference.

The project also garnered the support of celebrities like Lena Dunham, Spike Jonze and Laura Prepon.

"There is something appropriate to the spirit of New York about having a park underground, about using every inch of our space," Dunham said in a Lowline video.

"It really feels like we are living in the future," she added.

Barasch feels that the Lowline’s solar technology will unlock other spaces in New York and around the world and turn them into “magical and adventurous” places.

The trolley terminal below Delancey St. has been out of service since 1948. Its cars formerly carried passengers between Brooklyn and Manhattan.

 

The use of this uninhibited underground area will provide green space for the community to enjoy during all four seasons, Barasch explained.

Local teens shared their vision for the Lowline — a quasi-apprenticeship that Barasch believes will ensure the community remains connected to the space.

"It's incredibly inspiring and motivating to know that this isn't one person's fantasy project, it's actually a collaboration with a lot of people," he said.

Although the actual Lowline Park isn't happening for another five years, the Lab offers an inside look at the space's potential.

"This is what's so exciting about the Lowline Lab it gives us the first opportunity to see how people react and connect to this as a space in all four seasons," Barasch said.

The Lowline Lab, 140 Essex St. between Rivington and Stanton Sts., opens Saturday at noon. Free. For info, visit thelowline.org.