Transportation Access

Fifty-Ninth Street Station Elevators are Operational

    By Emily F. Keller

    The 59th Street - Columbus Circle subway station has four working elevators to take disabled travelers and others from street level to turnstiles and subway platforms. However, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has not informed the public that they exist.

    An elevator at the corner of 58th Street and 8th Avenue in Manhattan takes passengers to the gate and booth level of the station. There is one elevator that takes passengers from there to the platform of the downtown A, B, C, D and 1 trains. Another two elevators take passengers from the booth level to the uptown platform for the same trains. One more elevator is still under construction.

    Edith Prentiss, an advocate for accessible transit and a member of the New York City Transit Riders Council – an independent advisory board to the MTA – explored the station last week to locate the elevators. “We’re path finding,” she said.

A Trip to Dance

     By Emily F. Keller

    As Clara Bailon pushed over sidewalk cracks outside her home in the Bronx, she told stories about the old days.

    She remembered being left on the curb on her way to the beach with friends by a bus with a broken lift in the 1980s. She recalled quitting her job at a bank in lower Manhattan after graduating from college because glitches in the transit system made it difficult to show up on time. She talked about harassment and indifference from transit workers and commuters. She remembered being tripped over on the subway stairs during rush hour.

    “You have to learn to be a little assertive having a disability,” Bailon said about her experience with Access-A-Ride and the subway and bus systems.

    Bailon has spent decades asserting herself within a complex transit system that expands its accessible options gradually but incompletely. She praises the “good Samaritans” who have stepped in where the system falls short, lifting her wheelchair over gaps between subways and platforms where wheels sometimes stall, and offering directions to accessible subway stops that comprise less than one-fifth of the subway system.

    Bailon, who has fixed growth from a medical condition called Larsen syndrome, met her sister, Isabel, at the Bx15 bus stop that morning to travel to a belly dancing class for people with physical challenges at the New York University Hospital for Joint Diseases, which Bailon attends regularly. Isabel also has fixed growth. She travels in a manual wheelchair pushed by the sisters’ personal care attendant, Merci, while Clara controls her movement with a power wheelchair.