by Ken Stewart
If things tend to happen in threes, I don’t know what is about to happen to me, but I think I know where. It will be back on that major thoroughfare slicing up through the heart of midtown Manhattan, Sixth Avenue. Inside of three weeks, two major events in my life occurred only four blocks apart.
On June 3rd, the results of over five years of advocacy came to a climax when the first set of accessible pedestrian signals was installed in New York City. One of the four crosswalks at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street got the devices. They went where the infrastructure was already in the right place. No digging up the pavement for electric conduits. The Department of Transportation assures me others will be added as the pilot project is well received.
The APS advocacy began from the inside, so to speak. I wrote multiple resolutions while a member of Manhattan Community Board Number Four, a quasi-governmental entity comprised of 50 citizen appointees representing the neighborhood’s interests. Favorable response from the city’s DOT came only after I began writing letters describing my personal experiences with dangerous misjudgments of traffic movement based on too little visual information and distorted traffic sound patterns.
Just 16 days later I was handed the Olympic flame at Sixth Avenue and 27th Street to carry it up to the next torchbearer at 31st Street. I was guided by a star athlete from a Harlem high school girls’ track team. Even without the tether connecting me to Leila, I couldn’t have gotten lost. There were siren-blaring police escorts ahead, cheering spectators alongside, and a considerable entourage following behind.
It was a thrill to be so honored, and to join the distinguished company of several other American Council of the Blind members who have carried the torch during previous quadrennial ceremonies padding through a number of U.S. cities.
My nomination to the Olympic Committee came from one of the community organizations for which I volunteer, The Big Apple Greeter. That selection process began months before and involved considerable paperwork passing between me and the USOC headquarters in Colorado. I was required to sign very legal-sounding documents agreeing not to wear any advertising. The event’s sponsors, Coca-Cola and Samsung, understandably wanted no competitor horning in on their big photo op! I had to decide on uniform size to be issued, and had to agree not to leak out details of the pageant before the news conference at which the mayor presided.
At the official Gracie Mansion reception for all 150 of us selected to move the symbolic flame through all five NYC boroughs, I met some of the other participants. That celebration and the camaraderie in the hours before we all were distributed along the parade route almost equaled the excitement of those precious three minutes running up the avenue holding my right arm high with the fancy wood and brass torch. We, the merry band of honorees all dressed alike in white Olympic shorts and T-shirts, guffawed en masse at the curious transport which carried us to our posts. The huge permanent lettering on the side of the bus proclaimed, “Department of Sanitation!”