Joy Brown
Birds fly away, 2025
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Broadway Mall Association
The Broadway Mall Association cares for the planted malls running down the center of Broadway, five miles of green medians on Manhattan’s Upper West Side kept thriving for people, plants, and pollinators.
Services
Web Design & Development
Custom Plugin Development
Ongoing Support
Custom Plugin Development
Ongoing Support
Industry
Non-profit
Location
New York City, NY
brief
The Broadway Mall Association came to Rare Dimension needing a website that could work as hard as their small team does. Beyond a fresh public face, they needed donations, gala tickets, raffle sales, and a busy calendar of events and walking tours their own staff could manage, without a developer on call for every change.
strategy
We built the site on Bricks Builder, a lightweight WordPress framework, and paired it with a suite of custom plugins made just for BMA. Donation forms, Spring Gala ticketing, and raffle sales all run through a shared payments core connected to Stripe and Little Green Light, so every gift lands in their donor database automatically. A built-in form builder and homepage event controls let any editor launch a new campaign or feature an upcoming event straight from the WordPress dashboard. Rare Dimension continues to support BMA on an ongoing retainer, shipping improvements as their programs grow.
Built for the sidewalk.
Most visits happen on phones, between errands and train stops. Events, news, and giving all hold up on a small screen.
the design
A garden runs through it.
BMA’s site leans on two things: Chase Guttman’s photography of the malls, and a palette that never leaves the garden. Headlines are set in Montagu Slab, a serif with the confidence of good park signage, and Outfit keeps the body text light on its feet.
Greens and creams do the framing, and the photography does the talking. Even the donation tiers grow like the plantings do: Seedling, Bud, Blossom, Gardener, Broadway Circle.
Showcase
Three pages worth the trip.
Every build has corners we’re especially proud of. These are live right now, click through.
01
Neighborhoods
Five miles crosses a lot of neighborhoods, and each mall gets its own page covering its plantings, its art, and its stories. A love letter to the blocks.
See it live
02
Impact
The case for the malls in one place: what the plantings, the art, and the programs add up to, built for sharing with funders.
See it live
03
What’s Happening
Events, volunteer days, and news from the malls, kept current by BMA staff with the homepage controls we built for them.
See it live
the history page
Two centuries on one line.
BMA’s history runs from a Lenape footpath to next year’s planting list. Twelve entries is a lot to ask anyone to sit through, so the page hangs all of them off a single vertical rail: a dot for each moment, the year in small type, the headline in green.
The rail is the whole trick. Your eye has one thing to follow, so twelve separate entries read as one continuous story and you always know how far along you are. Archival maps and photographs drop in at column width between the entries, which lets an 1868 survey and a 1904 street scene share a page without either one taking over.
It was vertical from the start, so the phone version is the same page with a narrower rail. Nothing had to be rethought for the small screen.
the toolbox
Software of their own.
Built for WordPress
The WordPress raffle plugins we looked at were heavy, abandoned, or both, so we wrote BMA a small one of their own. Buy an entry and it talks to Stripe and Little Green Light at the same time: the charge clears and the entry lands in their donor database in one motion.
The same shared payments core runs their donations and Spring Gala ticketing, and a form builder lets staff launch whatever comes next without calling us.
Four plugins we wrote for them
- Donation tiers
- Gala ticketing
- Form builder
- Homepage event controls
try it
The raffle, running right here.
We rebuilt BMA’s raffle to run on this page. Eight of the real lots from the 2026 gala, the same stepper on every card, and the same pricing rule the plugin uses: $100 an entry, or three for $200, applied as you go. Add a few and watch the total sort itself out.
Pablo Caviedes
Barack Obama’s Portrait
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Carl D’Alvia
Duo-Lect, 2015
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Iliana Emilia Garcia
Trinity, 2023
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Jon Isherwood
Broadway Blooms, 2022
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Tomo Mori
Kimono Soul, 2026
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Kathy Ruttenberg
We Were Bugged, 2025
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Sean Scully
Selection of Books
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This is where it gets real.
0 entries · $0
- Stripe takes the payment
- Little Green Light logs the donor and the entry
- The receipt email goes out
On broadwaymall.org all three happen in one motion, with no one at BMA rekeying anything. Here, nothing is charged.
public art
Twenty years of art on the malls.
Since 2004, BMA has installed monumental public art along the medians. The site archives every season. Here are all fifteen.
Tom Otterness2004–2005
Carole Eisner2009–2010
Manolo Valdés2010–2011
Peter Woytuk2011–2012
Saint Clair Cemin2012–2013
Dan Colen2014–2015
Lars Fisk2014–2015
Tony Matelli2014–2015
Don Gummer2015–2016
Joy Brown2017–2018
Kathy Ruttenberg2018–2019
Nicolas Holiber2019–2020
Jon Isherwood2021–2022
Sean Scully2024–2025
Carl D’Alvia2025Tom Otterness2004–2005Carole Eisner2009–2010Manolo Valdés2010–2011Peter Woytuk2011–2012Saint Clair Cemin2012–2013Dan Colen2014–2015Lars Fisk2014–2015Tony Matelli2014–2015Don Gummer2015–2016Joy Brown2017–2018Kathy Ruttenberg2018–2019Nicolas Holiber2019–2020Jon Isherwood2021–2022Sean Scully2024–2025Carl D’Alvia2025
final thoughts
Still tending it.
A staff you could fit around one picnic table stewards five miles of Manhattan, and they treat their website like part of the landscape: something worth maintaining. We are still on retainer, still shipping improvements as the programs grow.
It is a strange joy to build Manhattan infrastructure from Bellingham. BMA runs lean and cares hard. Every so often a photo arrives of the malls in bloom, taken from a window we have never stood at, running past something we made. It never stops being fun.