"Access Education Day" 3: Symphony Hall out of tune with neighborhood

Posted by John B. Kelly

In its third "Access Education Day" in as many weeks, Neighborhood Access Group will be examining the private side of the public-private partnership between the city of Boston and Symphony Hall.

On Wednesday, July 19, from 4:30 p.m.-6 p.m., we will be "showing off" the terrible access in front of Symphony Hall, displaying our storyboards, and passing out information about the Symphony's poor record of neighborliness to its elderly and disabled neighbors.

We will be talking about how City-Symphony cooperation has created a design for the Symphony Area Streetscape Project that really "sticks it to us." The city will use precious funds to install fancy plastic crosswalks with "celebratory motifs" like musical notes. This represents another blurring of the line between public and private space, whereby the aesthetic whims of the powerful and the connected take precedence over the public safety of the people who actually live in the neighborhood.

In other words, these characters are engaging in active discrimination against a vulnerable population.

We have told the city over and over again that Duratherm plastic crosswalks -- they now make crossing much of Huntington Avenue a nightmare -- pose a public safety danger for elderly people and people with disabilities. Many wheelchair users say "they are as bad as the brick."

These crosswalks are cunningly designed do not violate state or federal law, but create such a fine vibration for users of wheelchairs, scooters and walkers that they are just as bad as the brick sidewalks. They shake a lot of us like a kernel of corn in a corn popper.

No brick will be installed during this project (rather, a fancy concrete with some sort of granite "stamp" will be installed), but at the same time, very little brick will be replaced-- a couple of feet past the Eliot Cohen wing entrance on the Symphony side of Huntington Avenue, and just to the driveway on the Symphony Plaza West side of Huntington. After that, people with disabilities are left to fend for themselves on one of the worst sidewalks in the city.

We have implored the city to recognize its mistake with the terrible City Hall pavers on Huntington Avenue, and simply replace them with concrete, but the city insists on torturing us by leaving in the same terrible bricks