It`s a rainy Sunday in May, so you and your husband pile the kids into the car and race off to the great indoors: Chicago`s hottest tourist attraction, the new Oceanarium of the John G. Shedd Aquarium.
Before you know it, you`re passing through a darkened corridor that feels as though it`s 20,000 leagues under the sea. Through a glass wall, you and your 3-year-old son see white-sided dolphins dancing an underwater duet, swimming side-by-side and upside down.
You come around a bend where there`s comic relief-fat penguins waddling around on rocks, like a bunch of stuffed shirts at a black-tie dinner party.
Then it happens.
Your son races away from you, trying for a closeup view of the black-and- white birds. He leaves the corridor, climbs down three steps and disappears into a sunken area where a crowd of parents watch the penguins with their children beside them.
Your heart races, but you can`t see your son amid the crush of people and you can`t get to the sunken area to find him. You can`t do it because you use a wheelchair and those three steps he went down without batting an eyelash might as well be the old Berlin Wall to you.
That`s pretty much what it felt like when Marca Bristo went to the $39 million Oceanarium with her husband and her two children, including 3-year-old Sammy, on May 5, 1991.
”Sammy went down the stairs, and a big crowd of people came passing through,” said Bristo, 39, who has used a wheelchair since she was injured in a Lake Michigan diving accident 15 years ago.
”I went after him and I was greeted by the stairs and I couldn`t get him. . . . I had the normal feelings that any mother would have. He was being consumed by the crowd and I wanted to retrieve him. I was worried that he would be lost or trampled.”
Bristo found other barriers in her way that day. She could not navigate the Oceanarium`s ”nature trails,” which require visitors to go up or down 29 steps to see a simulated northwest Pacific coast forest of spruce and hemlock trees, gurgling streams and cawing birds.
When Bristo entered the Oceanarium`s 1,000-seat amphitheater, eager to see dolphins leap into the air, guides separated her from non-disabled people and directed her to an area for people in wheelchairs, she said.
Other disabled people might have shrugged off the experience. Bristo, who is president of Access Living, a Chicago organization that serves people with disabilities, did not.
Eight days later she filed a complaint with the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, alleging that the Shedd Aquarium had violated city law by discriminating against people with disabilities.
Shedd director William Braker defends the Oceanarium, which was designed by the Chicago architectural firm of Lohan Associates.
”With respect to the time period in which the new Oceanarium was designed, the building was in full compliance with whatever laws were in effect,” Braker said.
Yet nearly a year after the complaint was filed, the aquarium reached a settlement with Bristo that required it to remove the barriers that faced her or come up with ways to let disabled people experience what`s behind barriers that can`t be removed.
According to the Shedd, the changes will cost about $50,000.
Equality for the disabled
Bristo`s case is not one in a million. An estimated one of every six Americans-43 million people-is disabled. About 1.5 million people with disabilities live in Illinois.
And those disabilities include more than just those requiring the use of a wheelchair. ”The general public includes people with disabilities,” said Eunice Joffe, a disabilities consultant with the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency that makes grants to artists and arts organizations.
With Joffe leading the way, the council is trying to break down barriers to the disabled at museums, theaters and scores of other places where the arts flourish in Illinois.
Instead of jackhammers, Joffe`s tools are pamphlets, conferences, a demonstration project and anything else that will nudge arts administrators into complying with the Americans With Disabilities Act, a wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits discrimination against the disabled in employment, transportation and public accommodations.
When he signed the bill into law in 1990, President Bush called it ”the world`s first declaration of equality” for the disabled.
Eliminating `special` groups
The part of the law covering public accommodations, which went into effect Jan. 26, mandates that more than 5 million places around the country-from hotels to bowling alleys, museums to theaters, aquariums to zoos-be accessible to people who are physically or mentally impaired.
For the disabled, the law someday may result in hundreds of small changes that will make life a little easier, or maybe even save it: lowering towel racks in bathrooms, installing handset amplifiers on telephones, or putting in flashing lights that warn a deaf person to escape a burning building.
Yet more is at stake than changes to buildings or arts programs. Disabled people want to be able to enjoy the arts without being cordoned off into
”special” groups. Advocates for the disabled liken that way of doing things to the segregation of the races that was struck down by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
”The Americans With Disabilities Act is meant to provide accessibility;
it`s also meant to provide integration,” said Rene Luna of Access Living, a disability-rights specialist who uses a wheelchair.
Harsh realities
But for now, those grand promises are coming up against harsh realities, the most important of which is financial. The disabilities act is taking effect at a time when arts organizations nationwide are struggling to survive as a result of cuts in government funding and a decline in corporate sponsorship because of the recession.
”It`s the worst time,” said Edward Able, executive director of the American Association of Museums, based in Washington, D.C.
”Museums are cutting staff and closing galleries and everything else, and here is yet another financial challenge.”
Moreover, the law is intentionally vague. It is not a building code with a strict set of instructions. It is a flexible-and fuzzy-set of guidelines whose brass-tacks meaning is likely to be hammered out in meetings between cultural organizations and people with disabilities, or in the courts.
In existing buildings, for example, the law calls for removal of barriers that block people with disabilities, but only ”where such removal is readily achievable, i.e. easily accomplishable and able to be carried out without much difficulty or expense.”
To add to the confusion, this is not a one-size-fits-all world in which something done to help one person with a disability will necessarily help a person with another-or even the same-disability. Not all blind people, for example, can read Braille.
Illinois and Chicago have laws that mandate access for the disabled in public places: the 1985 Illinois Environmental Barriers Act and a human rights ordinance passed in 1988 by the Chicago City Council. According to experts, whichever law goes further in requiring access is the one that applies.
Creative solutions
What`s an arts organization to do, especially if it doesn`t want to get zapped with penalties of up to $50,000 for violating the federal disabilities law?
You guessed it: Be creative.
Take Chicago`s Wisdom Bridge Theatre, a financially strapped, mid-size theater company that performs in a second-floor, walkup space on the city`s North Side.
Wisdom Bridge`s building has no elevator, which would allow people in wheelchairs to come to its plays. And there is no way the company can raise $150,000 to install one, according to its producing director, Jeffrey Ortmann. Instead, in an attempt to comply with the spirit of the disabilities law, Wisdom Bridge will try to occasionally perform at soup kitchens, centers for the aged and other places where the company can go to people with disabilities who cannot go to it. But financial problems make it impossible for Wisdom Bridge to put on such performances now, officials said.
Indeed, they said the financial situation is such that they are being forced to seek grants to continue the theater`s practice of providing signed performances for hearing-impared people. They say they can no longer afford the $1,000 to $2,000 for a signed performance.
”We`re creative people who will find creative ways to make this into an opportunity for ourselves and for others,” Ortmann said of the disabilities law. But he is quick to add: ”The real issue is that none of us really know enough about the law.”
Economic sense
To teach them, the Illinois Arts Council has organized a pilot program at the Apple Tree Theatre Company in north suburban Highland Park. Its mission:
To show how arts organizations can comply with the disabilities act without busting their budgets.
For the visually impaired, the theater prints large-type programs. For the deaf, it does occasional signed performances. For people in wheelchairs, it has installed removable seats in the theater`s front row, allowing people in wheelchairs to sit next to non-disabled companions.
According to Eileen Boevers, artistic director of the theater, the changes are costing hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.
”We`ve been amazed at the simple changes that can make a big difference,” Boevers said. ”There were inconveniences we just weren`t sensitive to, and they didn`t require a lot of money to eliminate.”
By focusing public attention on the disabilities law, such programs increase the likelihood that new buildings for the arts, as well as the programs in them, will be accessible to people with disabilities.
For example, as Chicago`s Museum of Contemporary Art designs a $55 million building and sculpture garden due to open in 1995, it is taking pains to ensure that a grand staircase facing North Michigan Avenue will not loom as an insurmountable barrier for people in wheelchairs.
Associate director Mary Ittelson said the museum will have an accessible entrance that will be as architecturally impressive as the main one-not the sort of dingy, backdoor space to which people in wheelchairs are often subjected. Museum guides will be trained to give tours to people with learning disabilities.
With museum attendance falling nationwide, the measures make economic sense to many arts administrators. ”It`s to your own advantage to include the disabled,” Boevers said.
The Chicago Commission on Human Relations, which enforces Chicago`s human rights ordinance, approved the settlement between Marca Bristo and the Shedd Aquarium on April 1.
The settlement makes clear that the Shedd, which has long had elevators and ramps for people in wheelchairs, does not admit to violating the Chicago law.
”We`re not ogres over here,” Shedd director Braker said. ”Back in 1980, we were the first major cultural institution that refitted our entryways and installed elevators for disabled access, and it cost us $400,000 to do that. . . . It`s rather hurtful to be accused of being insensitive when we were one of the pioneers in doing this.”
Some of the changes required by the settlement, such as reserving front-row Oceanarium seating for people with disabilities and their non-disabled companions, have been made. Other changes must be in place later this summer. By Aug. 15, the aquarium must install a lift at the penguin exhibit to give people in wheelchairs access to the sunken area Bristo could not reach. Braker estimated the lift will cost $25,000.
To allow people in wheelchairs to experience the nature trails, the Shedd will produce a video describing them. The cost of making and showing the video will be about $17,000, Braker said. Other changes, including a ramp that has been built at the sea-otter exhibit, are costing $8,000.
”It certainly was not intentional,” Braker said of the problems. ”We didn`t sit over here and think up ways we could irritate people.”
Bristo acknowledges that. But then she thinks back to the fear that overtook her when she watched her son race away to a crowded area where she could not go. She also thinks of the political battles people with
disabilities have fought to get laws protecting them on the books.
”I`ve probably passed by hundreds of thousands of violations in my life,” she said. ”This time, it affected me and my family. I felt as if I had watched one too many buildings be built inaccessibly.”
Myth and reality
Myth: The Americans with Disabilities Act-which mandates that public accommodations be accessible to people who are physically or mentally impaired-will force all museums, theaters and other cultural institutions to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make themselves accessible to people with disabilities.
Reality: In many cases, expensive changes to existing buildings will be necessary. But changes in public accommodations are required only when they are ”readily achievable,” which means they can be carried out without significant difficulty or expense.
In addition, some alterations can be made with relatively little cost. Theaters can use copying machines to print large-type programs for visually impaired people. Historic houses without elevators can produce videos that allow people in wheelchairs to see upper floors. Museums can train guides to include people with learning disabilities on tours with the non-disabled. New buildings must comply with the law, but private clubs and religious groups are exempt.
