By Carol Tannenhauser
“What will happen can’t be stopped. Aim for grace.”
— Ann Beattie
It took five years, but in June, 2022, the MTA settled a class-action lawsuit, filed in New York State by three New Yorkers with disabilities and several advocacy groups, agreeing to install elevators in 95% of New York City’s subway stations by the year 2055.
“Many of us who signed the agreement will not be around to see it,” said Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, 48, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “But by 2035, half the stations will have elevators,” he pointed out. “The fact that they would only agree to do it over 30 years felt — and still feels — disappointing. Whether we’re here or not, though, the next generations will just think, ‘of course every station has an elevator.'”
There is another lawsuit pending in federal court in which Blair-Goldensohn is also a plaintiff, arguing that not only must there be subway elevators, but they must work. “More than 30 elevators are out of service every day, and only 140 stations [out of 472] are accessible overall,” Blair-Goldensohn said, according to a City Council report. “And it’s not understood to be an emergency [when an elevator is broken], something they need to fix very quickly,” he added. “They don’t treat it with the urgency they would if the entire station were shut down and people were stuck in the tunnel. There doesn’t seem to be an understanding that when those elevators go down, disabled people are being trapped in the station, not able to get out.”
Blair-Goldensohn has been in that position, he said, since landing in a wheelchair nearly 15 years ago. “I have to take four elevators going to work and four elevators coming home,” he explained. “There’s actually a pretty high probability that one of them is going to be out.” Chances may be higher still since Gov. Kathy Hochul put a hold on congestion pricing and the revenue for the MTA it promised.
Blair-Goldensohn’s very-public story both horrified and had New Yorkers looking up nervously in Central Park for some time after. In late July, 2009, then 33 years old, a software engineer for Google with a wife and two young children, Blair-Goldensohn was taking his usual walk in the park on West Drive near 63rd Street, when he stepped directly into the path of a falling, pin-oak branch, which struck him in the head.
Revealed later by the Parks Department to be “rotten and in danger of falling for some time,” the branch was “four inches thick and fell 20 feet … putting a gash in [his] skull, damaging his upper vertebrae, and causing a partial lung collapse,” The New York Times reported. Ultimately, Blair-Goldensohn recovered, but he was paralyzed from the waist down.
I met him first in 2018 when I was covering a pro-subway-elevator rally on West 110th Street. I visited him again last week at his West End Avenue apartment — the one he grew up in — to talk about the lawsuits, what he calls his “experience” of being disabled, and what it’s like to “roll around” New York City.
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn
After this happened to me I came to a point where I thought, ‘Whoa. I had no idea.’ You know, you see people who are disabled, but I’d never really paused to reflect on the experience and what it would mean. It’s really been humbling, and you learn that everybody will have a disability at some point; it’s part of life. Disability can arrive suddenly or very slowly. In my case, it was quite sudden.
West Side Rag
Have you always been this sunny? There seems to be no bitterness about you.
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn
Right. I mean, I think I can be a pessimist or I can get cynical about some things, but, for the most part, no. I think I’ve been really lucky in life. My mom calls me “the luckiest unlucky person.” I’ve been shown a lot of love, and I’ve seen how beautiful and happily things can turn out. And so I, for the most part, focus on those things and how to share them, perpetuate them, and make them happen more. There are difficult days and difficult moments and hours and things, for sure.
West Side Rag
What is difficult?
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn
What’s difficult is when you feel like you’re in it by yourself, and that you don’t have a community and you don’t have your friends or relatives or people that want to help you or be in it with you, other people that understand. That’s been one of the big things I’ve learned over these years, how powerful that feeling [of alienation] can be.
West Side Rag
How do you counteract that?
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn
When you have something that devastating and then you do come back from it, it’s hard on some level not to wake up every day and think, like, ‘I’m still here. It’s amazing.’ You’re here. I’m here. I could so easily not be. So, if I just look around and think, you know, I get to be in this kitchen with my kids and see them grow up and, yeah, I see it from a wheelchair and I’m not standing up, but that’s fine.
West Side Rag
It’s not fine when it comes to riding the subway, as you famously wrote in a 2017 New York Times opinion piece, headlined, “New York Has a Great Subway System, If You’re Not in a Wheelchair.”
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn
It’s funny how these things go. You don’t expect to be a leader. Before [the accident] I was a computer scientist living life, kind of introverted, not community minded. After I wrote that New York Times op-ed, people who were part of a bigger activist group — Disability Rights Advocates (DRA) — got in touch with me and said, we’d like to do something around disability rights.
West Side Rag
You had already done something major for the disability community before that at Google, hadn’t you?
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn
I had the idea, yeah, in 2014, to put ‘accessibility features’ on Google Maps, and I started to talk to people at work and I’ve worked with a lot of colleagues who all helped to build it. It was such an obvious idea. We would never question putting the opening hours of a place on the map. You don’t want to show up and not be able to go in the door. Well, if I don’t know if it’s wheelchair accessible, it’s closed for me. If I show up and there’s steps in front or I can’t use the bathroom, that might as well be closed. Now, there’s more than 50 million places around the world with accessibility information on Google Maps. I was able to make that part of my official job at Google. “Google Maps Disability Inclusion Lead” is now my title, and what I do there.
West Side Rag
That’s incredible. Now tell us about the NYC subway lawsuit you were part of.
Sasha Blair-Goldensohn
I like taking the subway, because if you’re on the subway you can read, you can sleep, and you can take it with friends. I really like seeing musicians in the subway and I think if you grew up that way, that’s just how you get around. You don’t want to be stuck in traffic. But when I was growing up here, I never saw people in wheelchairs on the subway, and I just wasn’t aware that it was an issue.
What happened was, before writing that op-ed, I had traveled to Boston in around 2012 or 2013 to visit a friend. I was starting to be able to travel more independently in the wheelchair. And when I got there, I saw that in the Boston subway [system] almost every station now has an elevator and I thought, ‘How did this happen?’ And I came to learn that there was a lawsuit there that forced them to do it.
I was one of the plaintiffs in the suit to require the MTA to make all the stations accessible. The argument perpetually was, ‘well, it’s too expensive and we just can’t afford to do it.’ Our position was always, you have some amount of budget that’s discretionary. You’re deciding how to prioritize things, and we need for you to prioritize accessibility. It’s not okay to have something that’s a public good that only some of the public can use. It would never fly to say, ‘okay. We’re gonna have a system that only women can use and not men, or only kids and not older people.’ It’s a public good. It’s for everyone.
* * *
I could write about Sasha Blair-Goldensohn for much longer. I could tell you the details of the pending lawsuit, but you can read those here. I could tell you that he finishes the NYC Marathon in a very respectable time of around three hours. I could tell you about the Google team made up of company employees with disabilities that he travels around the country with, raising awareness about the essential “rightness” of accessibility, and how it will ultimately benefit all of society, both morally and economically. But I’d rather tell you about our parting.
I walked and he rolled down a ramp that has been fitted over his building’s one front step — for him, but also for others: parents with strollers, delivery people with hand carts, another wheelchair user. We headed up West End Avenue to West 79th Street and waited for the light to cross, looking towards Broadway. The avenue was all torn up in anticipation of repaving. I watched Sasha planning his route, considering the ruts and potholes. We made it across and arrived at the 79th Street Downtown 1 Station — his station, he said. We stood at the top of the stairs looking down. “You can see the platform. It’s right there,” he said, extending his arm. But he couldn’t reach it.
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Wonderful interview, thanks! Not so very long ago, there were able bodied New Yorkers who thought corner curb cuts were a waste of money and effort, a bit of overkill from “the disability lobby”. Ha ha – as anyone who has pushed a strolle, or walker, or dolly or etc etc can tell you – some things are just good sense. Thank goodness for Sasha, and every New Yorker, however they get around, who supports this initiative. I’m looking up DRA right now.
The “crime” is that it costs so much and takes so much time to get things done with transit. Sasha Blair-Goldensohn does a wonderful job showing people how one terrible incident can forever change your relationship with physical space and the city.
For example it sounds like he lives close to the 79th street station. But I see him at the 72nd street station because there’s an elevator (I recognize him from other media coverage). This means he wheels himself to a further subway station just to get to work.
It costs $80 MILLION per elevator. How insane is that? At what point does the outrageous cost to taxpayers be considered? Of course this is why they wanted to double tax hard working NYers who rely on cars. The entire congestion plan would have only covered maybe 80 elevators max over 5 years. Forget any funding for actually improving the rest of the system. Yes working elevators would be nice everywhere, so would a lot of things. But people need to wake up and find some common sense that sometimes the cost is simply not justified.
Because it’s not just people in wheelchairs who use the elevators. It’s also your aging parents, anyone with bad knees (i.e. most baby boomers), folks pushing strollers, those using crutches or a cane, someone who bought too many groceries at Trader Joe’s, people with luggage, etc. And because it’s the law!
Mass transit was designed for the “masses” – The price for changing that is staggering, and yet – no one wants fare increases, lots of people don’t even bother to pay a fare at all – where is the logic in all of this. The idea behind congestion pricing is to “get the other guy to pay for eveything – not me”. So we go from a ME generation to a NOT ME perspective?
Just a great story about a great UW citizen.
Thank you, Sasha!
A very moving interview and article, thank you.
The issue is ultimately that the state/city is a terrible allocator of capital. The reason he lacks sufficient accessibility is because it costs $80 million for an elevator.
Better govt -> more accessibility
The reality is that even in a city like New York, the majority do not care about ensuring equal access for those in wheelchairs or with mobility issues, which is, by the way, an increasing number of individuals. Unless you end up in a wheelchair or have trouble walking without a walker or cane and learn first hand how many places you cannot get into, you will never understand what it means to have your life so limited.
The streets, but especially the curbs, are a nightmare in terms of how uneven, bumpy and torn up they are and how hard that makes it to safely get around. The unevenness of sidewalks, the huge gaps between sections make it very dangerous for those in wheelchairs. Especially as many wheelchairs are not very sturdy and not meant for use on city streets. I know this firsthand after landing in a wheelchair post cancer treatment due to side effects. And then there is the issue of access to restaurants and entertainment venues. Many of these label themselves “wheelchair accessible” when they actually are not. I called ahead once for a doctor’s appointment in an UWS residential building. “Oh, yes, we are wheelchair accessible. ” Well they were not. You had to enter via the building’s main entrance, which had steps…and there was NO ramp, at all. Luckily, a doorman and my aide were able to carry me up and down the three steps.
And bathrooms? OMG. Hospitals, doctor offices say they are accessible when you can’t even get a wheelchair through the doorway!. And the placement of bars? Not helpful at all given how people have to access toilets.
I did not know about the Google maps for accessibility information. Brilliant and thank you to this gentleman for creating this. You’d think it would be a natural but again, the issue is accuracy.
It took 10 years for the building I live in to, finally, buy a small (and cheap) portable ramp for the one step into the building that makes it impossible to get in with a wheelchair. (It had been using a square piece of plywood that was literally falling apart, it was also used by the moving vans. The building spent a fortune on decorating the lobbies but couldn’t manage to get a ramp until tenants reminded the managing agent (and board members) about ADA requirements. Decoration is more important than to buildings.
It is a disgrace that NYC lacks ADA compliance and has not made the elevators (for which many in wheelchairs and with mobility issues must ride to get to/from work) available after all these years. No, we won’t be around and I truly doubt that all the elevators will actually be installed by 2055.
We are grateful for all of those working towards equality of access.
Sasha’s mom is no doubt right in calling Sasha “The luckiest unlucky person.” My grandfather used to say something akin to that: “You can’t hope to always be lucky in life. You have to hope to have good luck within your bad luck.” Kudos to Sasha for his tireless efforts and his achievements on behalf of disabled people, and, really, all people, as he notes. We are all lucky to have Sasha on this planet. Once again, The WestSideRag doesn’t disappoint in its well written, and thoughtful reporting.
It is awful, that it will take 30 years. I don’t understand why.
Bless him for his work. I’m not in a wheelchair but cannot navigate subway station steps. In addition to working elevators dare we hope that they will not be disgustingly dirty and smelly as they are presently? PS love the Ann Beattie quote.
Beautiful story Carol! I miss stories like this and writing with this particular tone. A true WSRag story!!!!
Great interview, great subject! I’m embarrassed and disappointed that NYC is now a city where we can’t do great things, or even decent things like make subways accessible to everyone. And why do we accept that it must cost $80 million/elevator?!
I’m with you, Sasha. I hope you get to take the subway from 79th St. in the not-too-distant future.