Lent, as anyone who knows anything about Catholics knows, is the season before Easter when folks eat fish on Fridays. Not hard to do in Louisville! And so many good fish-sandwich places! Lent starts next week and I was thinking about that, and the word itself -- lent -- and that got me to thinking about the word "lend" -- as in "lend a helping hand." It's a phrase one hears often when one comes up against a lack of access -- as though "lending a helping hand" is as good a solution as providing real access -- and certainly less economically painful for a business. Somewhere unspoken in all this is the message that if someone will "lend a helping hand" then the crip should be happy for that and not grouse about wanting some kind of physical, costly change.
I was by the Fish House (2993 Winter Ave.) the other day, and I got to thinking about all this. What brought me there, other than the fish sandwich, was the report I'd heard that they'd "winter-proofed" that big tent-like extension they have on the building. I wanted to see what that now looked like in terms of wheelchair access
The original building itself maybe was a filling station? Sort of looks like that -- an old one, pretty tiny. And the door you go through to place your order at the counter is up a big concrete step or slab.
Now that would be pretty easy to ramp, especially since they have all that room in that big tent-like extension. But they've never ramped it. (What's funny is that, once inside, they have ramped the floor where you go down to sit in the small, original dining area. Go figure! Maybe it was just ramped originally.)
But the deal is, I suppose, that you can sit in the tent area and someone will come and take your order. That is so typically the response of restaurants....
Anyhow, to get to the point: The new winterizing of this larger area included putting a big fat metal threshold at the door into the place. So you can't even get in THERE in a wheelchair.
Did anybody even think about it?
Doubtful.
Probably the response to any questioning of this renovation would be, "we can help you get in." Just like restaurants can "help" patrons in wheelchairs get up steps and over curbs.
The "helping" solution seems so practical, so correct that it's really hard to argue that it's not really appropriate.
But it isn't.
