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, 49, 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. “Right now, 30 of them break down each week,” Blair-Goldensohn reported, out of the 127 that currently exist in 472 stations throughout the city. “And it’s not understood to be an emergency, something they need to fix very quickly,” he said. “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 was paralyzed from the waist down.
I met him first in 2018 when I was covering a pro-subway-elevator rally on West 96th 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 or be in it with you, other people that understand. That’s been one of the big things I’ve learned over these years, is 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 wanna 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 employes 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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