How Broadway’s Tiny Green Spaces Became Neighborhood Gathering Spots

Four men sat beneath trees along Broadway, leaning over a makeshift game board spread across a bench. One man in a red sweatshirt reading “Grandpa” and an orange cap stared down at the pieces while another watched with folded arms. Behind them, flowers climbed around a sign reading Broadway Malls. People were not the only visitors there. Bees hovered around the flowers, and birds darted through the trees.

This year, the Broadway Mall Association will honor Rochelle Shereff and Brian Phillips at its annual Spring Gala on June 9. At the same time, the organization is continuing The Great Green Way, a plan to transform the 83 malls stretching from West 70th to West 168th Streets into a connected corridor of native plants.

For Rochelle Shereff, one of those malls carries nearly three decades of family history. Her late sister-in-law, Ruth Shereff, a reporter who lived on West 122nd Street between Broadway and Amsterdam, had a habit of planting flowers and improving the neighborhood around her.

“She always planted things, wildflowers, just to beautify the neighborhood,” Shereff told the West Side Spirit. “She helped people in her building and she was a good person.” After Ruth died in the early 1990s, Jesse Shereff, Rochelle’s husband, wanted a way to preserve her memory, and the family adopted the mall between West 121st and West 122nd Streets.

Today, the space looks very different. White and purple tulips lean beneath a wooden pergola. Benches sit in the shade, surrounded by shrubs and fresh spring growth.

But in the beginning, Rochelle recalled that neighboring institutions around the block had different ideas for the space. She believed two nearby seminaries wanted olive trees there, an idea Jesse gently dismissed. “Olives don’t grow very well in New York,” she remembered him saying. Eventually Jesse connected with the Broadway Mall Association and, as Rochelle put it, “the rest is history.”

For a period, she said, the mall had fallen into poor condition. More recently, she has watched it come back to life. “They’ve done such a good job,” she said. “I want my friends and people to see it because it’s a way of beautifying all of Broadway, not just the mall.”

She especially loves the pergola. “There’s a pergola at the end of it that people use to sit in and read and study and hang out, and it’s wonderful,” she said.

As part of the upcoming gala, Shereff will receive the Eugene Hide Award. Recognition itself, however, does not seem especially important to her. “Oh well, I was honored before. I don’t need to be honored again,” she said. “The award is looking at the mall and seeing how beautiful it’s become. They also gave me a bench, and that’s cute.”

Instead, she redirected praise toward BMA’s horticultural director, whom she credited with helping transform the space.

For years, Brian Phillips sat in the audience at BMA’s gala. This year, he will step onto the stage to receive the organization’s first Community Leader Award. Phillips has spent nearly two decades working throughout Upper Manhattan and watching neighborhoods change over time.

“What makes Upper Manhattan special is not only the architecture or the development happening around us,” Phillips told The Spirit. “It is the people, the cultural history, the small businesses, the public spaces, and the sense of connection that has existed here for generations.”

He said neighborhoods are built not simply through construction and development, but through relationships and shared spaces. “They help create human connection in a city that can otherwise feel fast paced and overwhelming,” Phillips said of public spaces.

“Public spaces are not just aesthetic amenities,” he added. “They are part of the social and emotional fabric connecting neighborhoods and the people who live in them.”

Maintaining those spaces, however, requires constant work. BMA helps oversee planting, public art, winter lighting and aspects of maintenance across all 83 malls. Some have been restored, others have not, and each serves different neighborhoods with different needs. “It’s just a lot of ground to cover,” Dana Ebralidze, BMA’s development coordinator, told The Spirit.

The work has also begun attracting unexpected visitors. Through a partnership with the New York City Bird Alliance, researchers found that restored malls attracted more bird activity than unrestored ones. Among the species observed were American kestrels, Baltimore orioles, yellow warblers and downy woodpeckers. Some migratory birds have also begun stopping there, including blackpoll warblers, a species whose population has been declining.

“It’s like the plants are for the birds. The benches are for the people,” Ebralidze said. “There’s something for everybody.”

Back beneath the trees, the game continued. People stopped for a while, talked, then got up and kept walking. Nearly thirty years after Rochelle Shereff adopted the mall in Ruth’s memory, people were still stopping there, exactly as she had hoped they would.