Los Angeles Herald Examiner
Monday March 7, 1988

[Headline] Sledgehammer tactics hit paydirt for disabled
Gordon Dillow

It was a pretty weird sight, even for a Saturday afternoon in Hollywood — a bunch of guys sitting in wheelchairs, pounding on the sidewalk with 10-pound sledgehammers.

What's this? l wondered. A chain gang for disabled felons? A new hire-the-handicapped-for-heavy-manual-labor program by the city public works department?

As it turned out it was neither. Instead, it was a group of disabled people resorting to what you might call "sledgehammer politics."

The issue at hand was something that most of us probably never even notice — curb cuts.

Curb cuts are those little ramps from the sidewalk to the street that they put at corners and crosswalks. Their primary purpose is not, as it may sometimes seem, to make it easier for skateboarders and other wheeled undesirables to terrorize decent sidewalk pedestrians; rather, curb cuts allow wheelchair people to get from the sidewalk to the street without having to wrestle themselves over a vertical curb.

Curb cuts are an eminently sensible solution to that problem -— so sensible, in fact, that l had just assumed that every corner and crosswalk in this town had them. That’s an easy assumption for someone who isn't in a wheelchair.

But a lot of places don’t have them — Hollywood, for example. Which brings us back to the sledgehammering wheelchair people.

THE SLEDGEHAMMERING wheelchair people in Hollywood were organized by Bill Bolte, who heads a “disabled rights" organization called ADAPT. For months, years even, Bolte has been badgering City Councilman Mike Woo and other officials to install curb cuts on the star-embedded Hollywood Boulevard “Walk of Fame" and elsewhere. What Bolte got in return was a lot ' soothing talk -- and no curb cuts.

Finally Bolte decided to pound the pols into submission. As he explained it to me, "They don't want to give us curb cuts? Fine. We'll make our own damn curb cuts.”

So Saturday afternoon, Bolte assembled about 20 wheelchair people on Hollywood Boulevard just west of Mann Chinese Theater, passed out some sledgehammers and started pounding on the concrete curb, right in front of the stars for Ward Bond and Casey Kasem.

The cops were right there, of course. But even though Bolte & Co. were clearly guilty of destroying public property, the cops didn't arrest anybody. For two reasons.

First, no cop wants to tag somebody in a wheelchair, lest he be mercilessly ragged at roll call for picking on a disabled guy. Besides, cop cars aren't wheelchair accessible.

And second, the sledgehammering wheelchair guys really weren't able to do much damage to the curb. Swinging a 10-pound sledge is hard enough standing up; sitting down it's darn near impossible. The best they could do was chip the curb a little bit.

STILL, THE DEMONSTRATION garnered a lot of press attention, which in turn built a fire under some of our local pols. And before the day was out Mike Woo promised that the city would begin designing the Hollywood curb cuts within two weeks. Two weeks!

Obviously, a little sledgehammer work can do wonders on a politician's head.

Now don't get me wrong here. I don't necessarily believe that society can afford to remove every conceivable barrier that disabled people face. And of course I ordinarily wouldn't condone the sledgehammering of public property —- with the possible exception of some of those hideous modern art sculptures that they put in front of public buildings these days.

Still, it doesn't seem like it would be a heartbreak of an effort for the city to install curb cuts at every corner. And it's too bad that wheelchair people had to break out the sledgehammers before the rest of us even noticed that they weren't already there.

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Wednesday 10 July 2013

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Monday 29 February 2016

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