Day 2. Access is Love
Image description (header): Landscape of an empty parking lot. At the left edge, Gil Hodges Bridge is in the distance. The sky is striated with storm clouds, bluegrey and white. The parking lot is dark beige, like wet sand, and white lines mark spaces for cars that aren’t here.
Walking the Edge, Day 2
In this post, I want to center the work of disability justice activist Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, along with Mia Mingus and Sandy Ho. The three friends and colleagues launched the Disability is Love project to “build a world where accessibility is understood as an act of love, instead of a burden or an after-thought.” #AccessIsLove grew out of a keynote speech by Mia Mingus in 2018. I want to lift up and center this reframing of access, beyond accommodation, beyond technical and logistical access, beyond inclusion and toward liberatory access, where people can engage with one another, and with place, in their wholeness and complexity. What new possibilities are made when access becomes an invitation to work differently, more imaginatively, instead of a list of accommodations?
Once, at Riis with Jonah, I recorded myself wondering aloud about all my recorder misses. All the ways of saying that have nothing to do with speech; all the ways I want to be accessed but lack a language for, and the other way, too—all I want to know of Jonah, but cannot simply ask. I learn, slowly, how to see what he shows me, without need for “knowing.”
As we were leaving the beach that day, I saw a small group of men on the boardwalk, standing behind/leaning on/rolled up to the beam and bars that mark the beach’s beginning or end. For them, the beach—dry sand littered with bottle tops and cigarette butts and tampon applicators and all manner of plastic, damp sand where the tide receded, the shifting line of the incoming waves—was just there, inaccessible. Two were in wheelchairs, one had Down syndrome, several had the postures of staff. How much of NYC’s 520 miles of waterfront can be physically accessed by people who use wheelchairs, or walkers, or a cane? What can be learned about “waterfront access” by centering real, meaningful access in a vision for a new way of being in relationship with the city’s edges? By listening differently, to those who are experts in navigating the ableist world and committed to rewriting it?
Prompt: Walk or roll to your nearest waterfront. Think of (or draw) your movement as a continuous line. Where does that line get interrupted or stopped short? What do you do when it does? If you are walking, how would the line change if you were using a wheelchair, and vice versa?
Once you’re there, ask yourself who isn’t. Wonder what we’re missing—what is lost when we can’t all access the water?
Walking the Edge is a project of Works on Water, Culture Push, and the NYC Department of City Planning
@works_on_water @nycwaterfront @culturepusher @nycplanning @adniralc1 @artschoolscammer @evemosher @gatablanco @scsunde @stoishere @nancy9000 @emilyblumenfeld @nickipombier @__sunandsky @_sunandmoon @prof.0und @bp_oddisee @underwaternewyork
#WalkingtheEdgeNYC #nyc520 #nycwaterfront
Image description: Landscape, where the beach meets the boardwalk, a concrete path with a railing, elevated above the sand. The sky is stormgrey, the ocean just visible as a streak of white at the left edge. In the foreground, an 8-year-old boy in a blue winter coat runs on the boardwalk, toward the stairs that go down to the beach.
Image description: Landscape, the ocean a slice of white at the horizon, the sky swept with formless clouds. The sand is dark beige, stairs are in the foreground, the boy is on the beach, walking toward the ocean, his and many others’ footprints visible behind him. A park sign reads “Unprotected Beach. No Lifeguards.” No one else is in sight.
Image description: Landscape, the boy faces the camera, his back to the ocean, beaming. He is wearing a bright blue winter coat and black pants with a fluorescent yellow line down the side. He is holding a clothes hanger in his right hand. The sand is peppered with white and black shells, the ocean is just visible in the background.