"Salem's Last Road" September 2007 Update

Bypass Road Diary 9-25-2007 008, originally uploaded by dmoisan.

So far as I know, the Salem Bypass Road is on time for opening next summer. This is a view of Bridge St. @ St. Peter, the southern end of the road.

Note the pedestrian. This intersection is currently the widest in Salem, though this will change soon. The solid red line indicates where Bridge St. will be relocated; it will be jogged 100 feet to the NW to meet the new road. Even with that, the spot that that woman is crossing will be five lanes wide.

I have definite mixed feelings about this as a pedestrian. Instead of the very congested, but managable Bridge St. to cross, there is now a wide river of road between my building and the train station.

Salem Depot and the Steps of Doom

MBTA Salem Depot Steps 2, originally uploaded by dmoisan.

In yesterday's Salem News (Wed., September 19th), Ed Carberg, of Gloucester, wrote about Salem Depot, the train station I have complained about in numerous past posts.

He puts it well:

Salem’s railroad station is positioned differently from those in the cities and towns that precede it. While the stations that come before it are either higher than street level or at the same level, Salem’s is below it, facing a high wall going up to the intersection of Bridge and Washington streets.

I do not consider Salem’s station attractive or overly welcoming. Worse than that is the manner of normal exit from it.
How would you like to be a traveler with a fear of heights, or any type of vulnerability? Well, I am one of these, and the Salem station certainly brings such fears to the surface with its stairway to Bridge Street in a state of semi-repair. "

He is not the only one who finds these steps scary. To a person with low vision,
stairs--particularly loose, broken, dark or just not well marked--are their
mortal enemy!

I had the dubious distinction of falling down these steps a year ago. I only sprained my ankle, but it hurt for some time and every time my ankle throbbed, I cursed those steps! It still hurts!

That's not been the only problem with those stairs. Several years ago, the top platform at street level had to be reconstructed when the concrete panels rotted away, leaving a 20 foot drop to the ground below.

Salem Depot is not quite 20 years old in its present location!

Mr. Carberg uses the wheelchair ramp that's about 50 feet from the stairs (off to the right in the photo.) Perhaps I'll have to do the same.

The Salem Commission on Disabilities

Handicapped parking sign at Museum Place, Salem

This past summer, I was appointed to Salem's Commission on Disabilities. What is the Commission on Disabilities and why am I there? Why should Salem care?

According to the Massachusetts Office on Disability, city and town disability commissions have the following objectives:

Commissions on Disability are established by vote of Town Meeting (in towns) or City Council (in cities) to promote the inclusion and integration of persons with disabilities in the activities, services and employment opportunities in the community.

Massachusetts passed enabling legislation for commissions on disability in 1980. Salem established its own commission in the early '80s; the late Andrew Quinn was the first chairperson. Jack Harris and Charlie Reardon are our current co-chairs.

Why am I involved?

I've written about disability issues before on the blog, and even earlier, with one of the first web pages on invisible disabilities.

I'm too familiar with disability issues; my foster mom hurt her back in a car accident some 30 years ago (the driver wouldn't wait for her to get in the car and she dragged my mom about 10 ft. down the street) and was since confined to a wheelchair.

Some years later, she made the cover of our weekly paper: She would go to the local CVS in downtown (then, and still, on Essex St.) to get her prescriptions, but she couldn't open the door to get in with her chair. I'll never forget--or forgive--the person in the letters column of the newspaper telling her, in so many words, to "stop complaining and just ask for help!"

That got my back up and still does. This attitude still persists, as in this article in the Globe Magazine this week, "Access Denied". Geoff Edgers took to a wheelchair for the day to see if access was improved for people with disabilities since he did this experiment in 1995.

He goes to the Charles Playhouse to get tickets for Blue Man Group. No ramp. 26 steps to the stage. He couldn't even get to the box office due to a truck in the way. The clerk at the box office offered to "get him carried up [the steps]. Lots of people do that."

Um, no.

Carrying someone in a chair is one of the most dangerous things you can do, for yourself and for the person you're helping. If the person is in a motorized chair, as many are, it's virtually impossible. I have had to help my mom move her chair a few times and hoped never to have to do it again.

Sidewalks are no better. Edgers discusses sidewalks and the infamous sloping walk on Boston's Huntington Ave., but I can think of plenty of examples just in Salem. Salem has cobblestones (!) in the Essex St. pedestrian mall, and they are miserable for just about everyone except the historical purists who installed them in the first place. Never mind people in chairs.

We have our share of "historic" brick sidewalks, many of which start crumbling as soon as they're put in, by their very design!

Homeowners with disabilities have problems, too. A disabled woman in Vinnin Square may have to move from her unit due to a dispute with the neighbors over the chairlift she installed on the common stairway she and her neighbor use to get to and from the sidewalk. (From the photo in the Salem News, I count at least 20 steps; even a single step can be unnavigable for one in a chair!)

Later in Edger's article, he quotes Bruce Bruneau, formerly of the Massachusetts Office of Disability. Bruce is discouraged:

"I thought I could make a change when I started doing this," Bruneau says. "I was wrong."

I've always held a cynicism towards most government, but I share Mr. Bruneau's discouragement in particular. Not everyone believes in access for people with disabilities.

People complain about the cost. They complain, to quote one of my former colleagues, about "those activists". I was talking about the Vinnin Square situation with a friend and was telling me how my commission didn't know about it until it hit the paper. He told me point blank that my commission doesn't get informed about situations like Vinnin Square because all we do is "want want want!" (My friend has never been to a meeting and doesn't know a lot about the Commission, but I was very hurt. A bitter irony is that he has a disability and his town has a commission like ours, and, the chair is a colleague of mine!)

I've heard all the other complaints through the years: "You want special rights!", "Why don't you have shops/coffeehouses/drugstores just for people in wheelchairs!" (otherwise known as "separate but equal", if you remember your history) "Can't you just stay home?" "Can't you just get help?" "Can't you work harder and overcome your disability?" "Just get rid of that illness thing!"

People with disabilities are a minority and thus especially vulnerable to "the tyranny of the majority", as Edgers' article makes very clear.

The Salem Commission on Disabilities is a civil rights commission, the only such commission in our government. We are an advisory commission and can only get things done by moral persuasion. Sometimes, we get a victory, as when we were involved with the Bates School renovation and got the contractors to realize all the bathroom fixtures in the kids' restrooms were adult-sized!

Other times, we have dealt with handicapped parking issues in the same locations (such as Salem Depot) again and again without any resolution. The Commission has complained about the cobblestones in the Essex Street Mall for well over 20 years to no effect. Prior to my confirmation on the commission, I saw and videotaped their meetings for 7 years and I cannot count the number of issues discussed that are still unresolved years later!

In the history of human rights, there has never been a population needing their rights that has ever had them handed to them ("Yup, we oppressed you and we're sorry, here are your rights!") They've always had to be taken. And no one involved has ever been comfortable.

Most people have an idealized conception of disability. People such as the late Christopher Reeves are "heroes". If Reeves were still alive and he wanted to come to Salem again (as he came to Salem State a few years before his death), he wouldn't need "civil rights". He was so beloved that people would line up to lift his chair for him and open doors.

But civil rights aren't just for the great and the good. If that logic were true, we wouldn't need the First Amendment for "good speech". But we know we need it for "bad speech" or at least speech that some would not want to hear.

Civil rights are for all. They're never easy to assert or to enforce, ever. But they're for all of us.

They are for your friend with a cane. They are for that woman in Vinnin Square.

These "special rights" may even be for you yourself! Remember that people with disabilities are a minority that anyone can join without warning, through accident, illness or plain bad luck.

(Sadly, some elected officials learn this first hand: A few years ago, the fine for illegal parking in a handicapped space was increased. One of the sponsors of the ordinance was then-Ward 1 councilor Scott LaCava, whose wife had to have both legs amputated after she was run down by a reckless driver.)

My foster mom did not live to see this, but CVS eventually put in automatic doors in all their stores. I may be pessimistic and cynical, but I am also stubborn. I'm taking my post on the commission for her memory, and for that of all the citizens, employers and visitors of Salem who will use and need our services.

For everyone.

Train runs on fumes!

[Beverly train passes a work crew under March St., Salem]

According to a poster on livejournal, and on railroad.net amongst other places, the 7:30 train from Rockport this past Sunday ran out of gas! True MBTA story!

Would have been funny if the train ran out of fuel under Salem, and if I'd been on it!

Salem, The Once and Future Walking City

[Essex St. Fair, part of Salem Heritage Days]

Continuing my last post on a car-free or at least car-neutral Salem, there's an interesting site called WalkScore.com. Plug in an address and it will mine Google Maps and give you a score that corresponds to the "walkability" of that location; in other words, the number of stores, restaurants, parks, libraries, schools, municipal offices and other amenities in walking distance.

The Walk Score for my home is 92. That's very good. The scoring system is limited by the information in Google Maps and the accuracy of its address database and by the distance measurement, which is as-the-crow-flies rather than walking distance, but the site is reasonably accurate for Salem, which doesn't have very many cul-de-sacs.

Walkscore, of course, cannot evaluate any of its listings on the variety of shops or the income level of any of their shoppers; I've complained before about the shops in downtown mostly catering to either the affluent or the tourist, neither category of which I fit in.

Still, as bustling as downtown is becoming, I remember when it was much better. If Walkscore had been in existence in 1970, it would have scored my downtown well over 100. There were many, many, many stores and establishments in downtown Salem. At one point it was the retail capital of the North Shore.

This is a part of Salem's history that is often willfully ignored. It doesn't have the property-values snob appeal of Nathaniel Hawthorne's era, but Salem's retail history is a proud one that I was fortunate to grow up in.

And I miss it terribly.

People have told me, "oh, you can't have those days back again!" Why not? The downtown of that era had everything! It was a time when Salem was a great working-class town for all, not merely the 18th-century-historic-themepark crowd that inhabit the city today.

I'll bet if Nathaniel Hawthorne had shopped at the old Almy's, that the store would have been preserved intact with its original use, instead of being torn down for condos in 1984.

Take care.

P.S. Kirk Westphal produced a great video as part of his master's thesis, Insights into a Lively Downtown. This 19-minute documentary about Ann Arbor's downtown is very applicable to Salem.

The Car Culture's Limit in Salem

[Bridge & St. Peter St at sunset, looking towards the bypass road.]

For once, there's an op-ed in a Salem paper I'm not screaming at (*cough* Taylor Armerding *cough*). Robert Moran's column in the Gazette, Salem as a change leader, says out loud what I've been trying to say in this blog: Salem has never been able to adapt to the Car Culture of the post-1950's and it should not have even tried.

Salem is often compared to other cities in the region like Peabody and Beverly that have direct access to major highways like 128 and 95. Why can't Salem have these, people ask? The Northshore Mall has a parking lot that is as big as the core of downtown Salem; why can't Salem have one that size?

Why can't Salem have more cars on the streets? Why can't Salem have more parking? Every so often, a business leaves Salem, such as the old Sears Credit in Shetland Industrial Park, and the refrain is, "Oh, if we had more cars/roads/parking, they wouldn't have left!"

Salem is a small city, just over 8 square miles of land. Virtually all of the developable land (apart from wetlands and parklands such as Forest River and the Salem Woods) has already been developed. Most development in Salem is of existing properties, such as Derby Lofts, and the soon-to-be-redeveloped Salem News building.

I've written before about the Bridge Street Bypass Road. That road took 30 years to get built and became a much shorter road than was originally proposed. The rancor surrounding this project has been so great that it's unlikely we'll ever see another project like that in our lifetimes.

Nor should we.

But it will take more than my desires to change things. To quote Moran:

While dreamers imagine utopia, many shiver as chill sweeps the spine: “How would I get anywhere? I’d have to buy a horse. The city would stink of horse poop. Either that, or I’d spend life tethered to a bureaucrat’s schedule, hanging around bus stops, and hoarding change.”

I'm delighted at the thought that the property-values activists on Federal St. may have to own horses and park them on the sidewalk instead of their SUV's, but kidding aside, there's a truth there.

Public transportation in Salem, as in most of the state, is a non-starter for most households in the city right now. There is no way one can ask the head of a family to wait in the snow or the rain outside Market Basket for the #450 bus that only runs every hour and that is usually late.

Back in the day, there were groceries like Salem Market (now Red Lion Smoke Shop) and Finast (now a Walgreens) downtown. The Boston St. area had Giant Valu, then Crosby's, then nothing. Repeat this for clothing stores, sporting goods and so forth. How many bakeries were there downtown back in the day? Versus now? (only A&J King on Derby St. and they survive on the Derby Loft yuppie traffic.)

You can't live on the shops downtown.

Even the number of convenience stores in our neighborhoods has declined; it's easier to drive a quarter-mile to Hess or 7-11.

Highland Ave. has all the retail, but it is a miserable place for pedestrians and T riders to navigate. (Try coming back from Walmart and crossing the street to get your bus back. With kids. Good luck.)

Ultimately, I'm pessimistic over the prospects of alternative transportation. It'll take a crisis like the Second Energy Crisis to motivate people and even then they have to be convinced things won't change by the closing credits.

But it's good to have at least a few people in the street aware of these things.

Rainbow at the ballgame

North Shore Spirit Rainout (39), originally uploaded by dmoisan.

A rainbow at Frasier Field, Lynn, bottom of the first. Sadly, it was the highlight of that evening since the game was called shortly thereafter.