Solar Technology To Build An Underground Park In New York Gets Crowdfunded On Kickstarter

Anyone who knows anything about New York can tell you that the most famous park of the city is the Central Park but if the fellows of The Lowline are successful they will be create a new park that will overshadow Central Park’s popularity in an instant. The park that they are currently conceiving will be the world’s first underground park complete with trees and sunlight all round the year. The team with the help of two successful Kickstarter campaigns has been able to build a prototype solar technology that is able to bring sun’s rays underground. With the money that they obtained from the first Kickstarter campaign they held in 2012, they were able to build and install a solar collection system in a warehouse for a single tree. Their recent Kickstarter campaign for garnering $200,000 was completed successfully today with funds of $223,506 from over 2500 backers.


So what are they going to do with this money? Well, they are not going to build the underground park straight away. They will use this money to create the Lowline Lab in New York where they shall rent a former warehouse space to build three solar collection systems on the roof and redirect their light into this warehouse for an extended period of time which is about 6 months. The obvious question that is popping into the mind is that how exactly they plan to bring sunlight into New York’s underground? Well they are counting on a technology that is a lot more complicated than the time the Mythbusters tried to #-Link-Snipped-# of the scene “Let There Be Light” from the movie “The Mummy”.

The teams will place solar collection system on rooftops surrounding the Lowline Lab and use extremely efficient mirrors to reflect that light down to the street level, and direct it underground via tubes. The team at The Lowline have partnered with a Korean solar equipment manufacturer SunPortal to build these collection systems. The sunlight that reaches to the lab will be transferred to a hand-built 40-foot-wide canopy inside the warehouse, to help reflect natural sunlight into the Lowline. The team has chosen the time from September to February to test their system as chilly winters will decide if the system is viable or not.


If the team is satisfied with their results, they shall be approaching to New York City authorities for permission to build the full scale underground park at a 107-year-old former trolley station, right below Delancey Street in the centre of New York City's Lower East Side neighbourhood that has remained vacant since 1948. There isn’t a particular timeline fixed for that but we hope that the team is successful because it shall help other crowded cities build their own parks underground that remain functional all round the year.

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