Broadway Mall Association
Transforming medians in gardens

Who We Are

What’s five miles long, twenty feet wide, and green?

A Broadway mall.

Our malls are traffic medians that divide the middle of Broadway, and provide pedestrians a leafy shelter, a place to pause, sit, and meet in our neighborhood.
Stretching from 70th Street to 168th Street, the Broadway malls form nearly five miles of connected green space — about 10.6 acres of parkland running right down the center of Manhattan’s West Side. Each one averages about 240 feet long and 20 feet wide, creating a ribbon of greenscape along Broadway.
In a previous era, these malls were broad, grassy promenades where people strolled. (They were never shopping malls as the name might suggest!) Today, they are planted medians — lined with shade trees, shrubs, and layered plantings — bordered by the streets leading uptown- and downtown.
At the north and south ends of nearly every mall, you’ll find garden beds — small but vibrant spaces filled with roses, perennials, ornamental grasses, shrubs, and seasonal flowers. Designed for year-round interest, they offer changing color, texture, and habitat throughout the seasons. Benches frame these gardens near crosswalks at each intersection, creating natural gathering points. They’re places to pause between errands, meet a neighbor, read in the shade, or simply take a breath.
The malls aren’t just medians. They’re a five-mile front porch for Manhattan’s West Side.

Our Mission

The Broadway Mall Association engages and connects the diverse communities along the five-mile stretch of landscaped malls from Washington Heights to Manhattan’s Upper West Side to create visually beautiful and culturally vibrant public spaces open and accessible for all to enjoy.

Help grow our work

Our work goes beyond beautification

In response to climate change and species decline, BMA’s expanded focus is ecological restoration and biological uplift — the foundation of our vision for The Great Green Way. Since 2024, we have completely restored many malls including 73rd Street, 83rd Street, 164th Street, and more, removing invasive English ivy and replanting with dozens of native species from the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. These landscapes do more than beautify Broadway — they create an essential habitat for local pollinators, birds, and bats, and become ecological corridors.

Founded in 1980 by Eugene Hide after years of fiscal-crisis neglect, BMA began as a grassroots effort to restore Broadway’s planted promenades and became a nonprofit in 1987. Read more about our history here.

Today, as millions of New Yorkers live around and traverse Broadway – from the Upper West Side to Washington Heights – BMA is reimagining the malls, through restoration and community stewardship, as a continuous, climate-resilient greenscape.

Broadway Mall Association: transforming medians into gardens

For more than 30 years, the Broadway Mall Association (BMA) has cared for the five miles of green space in the middle of Broadway — planting, restoring, and stewarding the 10.6 acres of parkland for the neighborhoods it connects.

Each season, we plant annuals and bulbs, tend trees and shrubs, maintain garden beds, add winter lighting, and curate public art installations that enliven the corridor. We partner with city agencies, business improvement districts, workforce programs, and community organizations to keep the malls welcoming and vibrant year-round.