By now you’ve probably already heard and read about James Ramsey and Dan Barasch’s radical proposal to bring an underground park to the Lower East Side via Essex Street Trolley Terminal below Delancey Street. What you may not know is that the LowLine, as it has become known, has just launched a KickStarter Campaign with a goal of raising $100,000 by April 6th. Here you can pledge money and receive prizes for your donations if funding succeeds. The masterminds behind the projects are not slowing down. Conversations about this project and its possibilities are spreading. Just last week, the Tenement Museum invited Ramsey and Barasch, along with historian Stuart Blumin to discuss the project and some of its social and political consequences.
For most people NYC is an assortment of distinct neighborhoods, rich in history and bleeding into one another, punctured by vast public spaces: Times Square, Union Square, Columbus Circle. But Stuart Blumin, historian and professor, points out that NYC’s grid system, developed by the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan, has actually created a “grid-iron” design of uniformity – one that is “very unfriendly to public space”. All of those spaces listed appear at intersections that are exceptions to the regularity of the grid – they follow Broadway, the street the cuts diagonally across Manhattan creating triangles along its route. These spaces, far more ideal for idling and gathering, are very rare in NYC and specifically in the Lower East Side where Ramsey and Barasch’s proposal takes us.
