By Carol Tannenhauser
I live across the street from the West 81st Street and Central Park West subway station, the one on the southwest corner near the American Museum of Natural History. On June 17, construction will begin on an above-ground elevator at that station, which will travel three levels down through Manhattan’s bedrock to the lowest track. It is expected to take three years to complete.
I work at home and my office window faces the station. I quickly realized what this project would mean to me. Not just the mess and disruption of construction, but, worst of all, the noise. I thought impatient cab drivers leaning on their horns to cross the 79th Street transverse were bad. Now there would be jackhammers and other teeth-rattling reverberations — from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, except sometimes when work would last till 10 at night and take place on weekends.
I was bummed. My home, my work space, my sanctuary are being invaded, realistically, until 2027.
Then, I had another thought — of Sasha Blair-Goldensohn, a young man I had interviewed in 2018 at a rally for accessibilty, when the 110th Street subway station on the same line was being renovated without an elevator.
Nine years earlier, in 2009, Blair-Goldensohn, then 33 years old, a Google engineer with a wife and two young children, was hit by a rotted, 100-pound branch that fell on his head during his regular walk to the subway through Central Park. He was in a coma for a month and a wheelchair ever since, his spine partially severed, his lower body paralyzed.
“It was extraordinarily bad luck,” he told me that day at the rally. He said it had turned him from a “private citizen” into a “disability advocate.” He was holding a sign that said “Let Us Ride!” with a picture of a dinosaur on it. He explained that it was made by his then-11-year-old daughter.
“It has the dinosaur to symbolize that these stations are dinosaurs,” he said, “and, also, that the station right by the Natural History Museum doesn’t have an elevator either.”
I emailed Blair-Goldensohn for his reaction to the news that the 81st Street station is, in fact, getting an elevator. How does that make him feel? I asked. I also told him my story, and that remembering his “makes me say, ‘you know what? I’ll deal with it…even the noise.’ When it gets bad — and it will — I’ll just think of you and remind myself that it’s worth it.”
And that’s what I intend to do.
I haven’t heard back from Blair-Goldensohn yet, but I’m not sure the email address I used is current. I know he’s still advocating, because I read about him in a 2023 New York Times article. I also read that he is a longtime Upper West Sider. I hope he and his daughter are savoring the news. I calculate that she’ll be about 20 when the elevator is finished, not nearly too old to visit the museum with her dad.
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