"Everyone Wins!" rally

posted by John B. Kelly

(This represents the first posting in almost a year to this website, but unfortunately I'm having problems linking these new posts to the old ones. In the meantime, I will supply links at the bottom of this posting to lead into the website.)

Neighborhood Access Group (NAG) and and the Boston Center for Independent Living (BCIL) are sponsoring a rally next Friday, October 5, from 12 p.m.-2 p.m., at the corner of Huntington Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue, near 333 Mass Ave. and Utrecht Art Supplies. We are calling the rally "Everyone Wins!" because we are proposing a solution to the four-year-old problem on Huntington Avenue, where bumpy and dangerous brick sidewalks had been torturing people with disabilities.

We have been protesting the bricks since we first saw them go down, beginning with a protest in September 2003, City Hall hearings, petitions and letters to the Mayor, and a complaint on one portion of Huntington before the state Architectural Access Board (AAB). Nothing else worked but the complaint, now over three years old, has resulted in a fine of over $300,000 against the city for not bringing the sidewalk into compliance with state access codes (it's still tilted).

The city has unsuccessfully gone to court twice now over this issue, and appears ready to throw in the towel. It has realized that the entire sidewalk is out of compliance with the law, and told the AAB that the city is trying to decide between ripping out all 14 blocks of bricks (between Mass Ave. and the Museum of Fine Arts) and replacing them with concrete, or "polishing" the brick with grinding machines. The switch to concrete would cost an estimated $384,000.

This is a momentous development. As the lead complainant in the AAB case, I will be asking the access board to look favorably upon a city decision to restore concrete by allowing the city to use the fine money towards the reconstruction. Because the MBTA and the state were also involved in this project -- it was born out of the federal mandate to bring the E Line into compliance with access law -- they should also contribute. The MBTA failed miserably in its role as the lead agency in the sidewalk construction, because it never bothered to inspect the contractor's work

For more information, please check out these links:

Boston Globe story and video, September 16, 2007

In 2005, Globe columnist Monica Collins wrote a piece in the Boston Globe magazine on this very sidewalk. Monica Collins on brick sidewalks.

On why people with disabilities can't stand brick :

Billie Tyler , Pam Beeler, Eileen Brewster, Alyson Perry, Liz Casey, Devin Chausse, Louise Kelly, Stacy Berloff, and there are many more.

And then there is this one, from the front page of the Boston Herald last month:

Disabled rip Hub’s $320G sidewalk
By Marie Szaniszlo
Sunday, August 26, 2007

Meet the most expensive patch of sidewalk in Boston: $320,000 and counting.

The state Department of Public Safety’s Architectural Access Board has fined the Hub $500 a day since Nov. 30, 2005, for an uneven, sloping stretch of brick on Huntington Avenue, part of what advocates for the disabled denounce as a pattern of violations in the city that puts them at risk.

“The irony is if the city had just made sure the sidewalk was repaired the right way in the beginning, it would have cost taxpayers a fraction of that amount and people like me who use wheelchairs wouldn’t have to risk getting hit by a car by riding in the street,” said John Kelly of the Neighborhood Access Group, which filed the complaint with the board.

[More at the Boston Herald website]

Rough spots pose perilous challenges
By Marie Szaniszlo
Sunday, August 26, 2007

EXCERPT:

“To you, it probably looks fine,” Kelly said on a recent Saturday, nodding toward the brick sidewalk at Huntington and Massachusetts avenues, across from Symphony Hall.

And it did, until a woman came along, pushing another woman in a wheelchair as it rumbled and tilted over the bricks.

The unevenness of the bricks and the slant of the sidewalk make it particularly difficult for people who are blind or who use manual wheelchairs because the sidewalk’s horizontal slope - which in some places is more than double the maximum 2 percent grade permissable under state law - makes gravity pull them toward the street, said Thomas Hopkins, director of the state Department of Safety’s Architectural Access Board.