Daniel Rubin: Bumpy roads for wheelchairs

Monday's column on Cliff Roberts wheeling his chair through the inaccessible city caused my phone to ring so much I knew I'd hit a nerve.

"It's just as bad in the suburbs," said Barbara Quinn, 60, of Aston in Delaware County. She started by ripping into the nice man at her hair salon - a brand-new place in an expensive building.

"When I went in there, the first time after it was completed, the owner said to me, 'How do you like our building? It's all handicapped-accessible.' " The owner proudly noted the elevator for those who can't climb stairs, the bathrooms with rails for those who need to support their legs.

All great, Quinn replied. Now if only she could get in the place. No automatic doors.

The owner replied that the township didn't require that.

So Quinn, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, says she has to drag her husband along to the beauty parlor or wave until someone sees her and lets her in, which makes her uncomfortable.

The hardest part about her using the wheelchair, she says, is emotional. She doesn't see herself as someone who has to rely on others.

"I've learned, I guess, through this disease that I have to swallow my pride and ask for help."

The one place where she loves shopping is Kohl's. "They're a delight. They have automatic doors. Their aisles are wide. And they have a mannequin sitting on a pedestal and the mannequin is disabled. It's the only place I've seen that."

Nicholas Vincent Siravo wonders where are all the kind strangers that Quinn relies on. He lives in the Wissinoming section of Northeast Philadelphia and suffers from a host of maladies that made him unable to walk.

"The whole world is out to get people in electric mobility carts," says the 61-year-old retired printer. "We're the freaks of the world. People don't like us. We're in their way. They have to open doors for us. They have to move aside for us."

He had so much trouble pulling open the doors to the bank in his neighborhood, he says, that he started using the drive-in window . . . until an employee came out screaming that they had no insurance for that, and he had to go inside.

Siravo said he got tired of waiting for someone to see him and open the door, so he complained. They put in a bell. But that didn't help.

"You ring it and you ring it. They look at each other, 'Aren't you gonna get it?' "

Some callers or e-mailers groused about perfectly able people hogging handicapped parking spaces. One caller, a former police officer whose son is disabled, said he used to love writing up those who abused these precious spots.

"It's tough all over," Quinn said. "Restaurant owners, shop owners should stay in a wheelchair just for one day, and then they'd see the challenges that you face."

Josh Winheld, who like Clifford Roberts suffers from a muscle-atrophying illness, expressed by e-mail his frustration with uneven curb cuts, which make it hard to navigate his wheelchair.

That thought was seconded by Arlene Halpern, of 15th and Locust in Center City. She said her wheelchair-bound husband cannot travel 50 feet south without hazarding his health trying to get off and onto the sidewalk at Sydenham Street.

"The ramps on both sides have crumbled," she said. "It's almost impossible to go through on a wheelchair, and when it rains, the water collects and it takes a couple of days to drain." That complaint about curb cuts I heard from three wheelchair users.

A quick lunch-time inspection showed those two ramps to be treacherous - a pocked slope of granite and stone and macadam roughed up by a steady tide of heavy traffic.

Halpern said she's called a councilwoman twice since October. She was told that the cold weather makes immediate repair unlikely.

"Here in the snootiest neighborhood in Philadelphia you find dilapidated streets," she said. "No one is immune from The Treatment."