Little Island
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, REST API
YEAR
2021
EXTERNAL URL
Little Island is unlike anything else in my portfolio. Not a theater, not a venue in the traditional sense — a $260 million public park rising from the Hudson River on 132 concrete tulip structures, with a full-season performance calendar, weather-dependent operations, and millions of annual visitors. I built the custom WordPress platform that powered it all: events calendar, weather and date API integrations, and a content architecture designed for the density of year-round cultural programming across multiple outdoor stages.
Development lead at Situation Interactive.
Background
A quarter-billion-dollar public park needed a digital platform as ambitious as the project itself.
Little Island — the 2.4-acre public park built on 132 concrete “tulip” structures rising from the Hudson River at Pier 55 — opened on May 21, 2021, after nearly a decade of development, a lawsuit that temporarily halted construction, and $260 million in funding from the Diller-von Furstenberg Foundation. Designed by Thomas Heatherwick’s studio and featuring a 687-seat amphitheater, an intimate performance space called The Glade, and a maritime botanic garden with over 350 species of plants, the park was conceived as both a public green space and a year-round cultural venue. Four inaugural artists-in-residence — director Tina Landau, tap dancer and choreographer Ayodele Casel, Pig Pen Theater Company, and actor-singer Michael McElroy — were curating the opening season’s programming across dance, theatre, music, and opera. Unlike the traditional theater sites that made up most of my Situation work — NJPAC, Roundabout, the Broadway show builds — Little Island was something genuinely new: a public park that happened to be a performance venue, where weather, botany, and accessibility logistics sat alongside the events calendar as first-class concerns. The timeline was fixed to the park’s opening — the site needed to be fully operational before the first visitor walked across the gangway.
Most of my arts and culture builds served existing institutions with defined audiences. Little Island had no audience yet — just a park about to open its gates and a digital platform that needed to serve millions of strangers from day one.
Implementation
A custom WordPress build with a full events calendar, weather API integration, and the content architecture to run a public park.
I led development on a custom WordPress theme where the events calendar was the defining technical challenge. The performance calendar was a fully interactive, date-driven system rendering events across multiple venues — The Amph, The Glade, and park-wide programming — with genre-based filtering across dance, music, theatre, opera, and general events. Events loaded asynchronously via JavaScript, with date picker navigation, category filters, and calendar export functionality supporting Google Calendar, iCal, and Outlook formats. The system needed to handle the programming density of a venue running multiple events per day across multiple stages, with each event carrying its own structured data — venue, time, genre, ticketing status, and artist information. A weather API integration surfaced real-time conditions on the site, giving visitors current weather data relevant to an outdoor park where programming and access are weather-dependent. A date API integration provided dynamic park hours that adjusted seasonally. The broader site architecture covered the full operational scope of a public park: visitor information with directions, accessibility details, and rules; landscape and botanic garden content with over 350 plant species documented; design and construction history for the Heatherwick Studio project; community engagement programming; a press newsroom; and Mailchimp-powered newsletter signup with multilingual support across 13 languages via Google Translate integration.
The events calendar was the most complex integration I had built to that point — a system that had to be fast enough for casual visitors checking tonight’s shows and robust enough to power a venue running hundreds of performances per season.
Results
Live for opening day, powering a venue that has welcomed over three million visitors.
The site launched ahead of Little Island’s May 21, 2021, opening and served as the park’s primary digital platform from its first day of public access. The events calendar powered the entire inaugural programming season — from the first Free Music in the Amph concert on June 13 through weekly curated performances in The Glade and the Broadway Our Way Live series — and continued to scale as programming density increased across subsequent seasons. Since opening, Little Island has welcomed over three million visitors and featured more than 1,260 artists across its performance venues. The platform I built carried the park through its critical first years of operation, supporting the events calendar, visitor information, and content management that a year-round public venue requires. The site has since been handed off and reskinned by another team, but the core content architecture and calendar infrastructure I designed served as the foundation that the park operated on through its formative period — proof that the technical decisions made at launch were sound enough to carry a $260 million public institution through its most important years.
The events calendar alone was more complex than most entire site builds. The broader platform became the digital infrastructure for one of New York City’s most celebrated new public spaces — and a reminder that the most interesting projects are often the ones that don’t fit neatly into a category.
