In two years’ time, the Lower East Side will be home to the world’s first underground ‘green’ space – the Lowline

To get a glimpse of what will eventually become the Lowline, a subterranean Eden being billed as the world’s first underground park, you have to swipe your MetroCard at the Lower East Side’s Delancey Street station, go down one flight of stairs, go down another, slither through a few characteristically congested subway corridors, and then up another flight, to the J train platform.

Here, in the crucible of Manhattan’s public transportation system, with its slow, industrial wheeze, is an abandoned space the size of a football field. Seventy years ago it was the Williamsburg Bridge trolley terminal, transporting city folk between boroughs. But since 1948 it’s existed in a state of dark, musty desertion, save for tall metal columns, a few men in hazmat suits and the outlines of the balloon loops in which the trolleys once turned, which will be integrated into the park’s walkways.