Herald front-page story on Huntington Avenue, August 2007

Posted by John B. Kelly

This front page story in the Boston Herald, by ace reporter Marie Szaniszlo (the only reporter I've ever talked to who gets things correct), ran on August 26, 2007. Excerpts below

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.
...
“The continued dangerousness of this bumpy all-brick sidewalk has these past four years been torturing the hundreds of elderly and disabled people living next door at Symphony Plaza,” the Boston Center for Independent Living, the Disability Policy Consortium and the Neighborhood Access group wrote in a July 26 letter to Public Works and Transportation chief Dennis Royer.

Dennis Royer, whose two plans to fix Huntington Avenue landed quickly in the garbage can because they were discriminatory or ludicrous, has been replaced as the point person for access in the city by Director of Neighborhood Services Jay Walsh.