A Case: #AscendWithPride at F.D.R. Park Kevin Gotkin
This essay was adapted from remarks offered at “Access Check: Mapping Accessibility 2.0” at the 8thFloor / Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation on July 18th, 2019.
A photo by Nick Reid shows a wide set of stairs with a rainbow on them. Above, there are treetops and a blue sky with clouds.
What is the “case” of stairs? The Oxford English Dictionary refers to one definition of the “case” in “staircase”: “The frame in which a door, stair, or window is set.” Stairs are set in something larger.
Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has written about the case study as a problem of folding the singular into the general.[1] When we are not convinced by a case study, we often say it’s just one case and it does not become general. But when it works, Berlant says, it causes a shift in “a personal or collective sensorium.”[2]
Disability politics is just this kind of shift. The production of disabled people into case studies in medicine, so-called criminal justice, and the scientific racism and ableism of eugenics is an essential part of modern histories of science. And for decades, disability activists have resisted these legacies by counter-diagnosing systems, speaking of the case of ableism, and undoing the fixation on individualizing the experience of marginalization. The case of disability ties together individual and collective desires for new ways to design things.
A case of stairs is not just about its material form, but also about the design protocols and imaginations of hypothetical people who will move in a given space. Stairs can tell us a lot about the kind of cases that hold it.
In my work I try to find instances, like the bellows of an accordion, which can fold out what is concealed so we can understand how the whole thing works. The problem of the case is in determining the surplus to the singular. What is x a case of?
A photograph my Corey Antiel shows people sitting and standing on the rainbow stairs on a recent summer day.
I take this problem of determining the surplus to the singular as an invitation for us all as I introduce this case: The case is the 12-by-100-foot set of stairs at the F.D.R. Four Freedoms State Park on Roosevelt Island, which was transformed into a large rainbow last month, from June 14thto June 30th, 2019.
An image released by Four Freedoms Park shows the rainbow stairs leading to a stretch of grass that is flanked by two lines of trees that point like an arrow to the tip of Roosevelt Island.
F.D.R. Park is on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, in the East River between Manhattan and Queens. It is the first and only memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt in his home state. Roosevelt used a wheelchair for several years after contracting polio. And yet, the park is inaccessible to wheelchair users.
In 2017, a class-action lawsuit sought to address this inaccessibility, noting that the elevated tree-lined arrow that forms the bulk of the park is accessible only by stairs and the alternative route to the tip, where the memorial of FDR is installed, is an inclined path of uneven paving stones, gravel, and grass. The suit also notes that the gift shop and the bathroom are also not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.[3]
A photograph by Iwan Baan shot from above shows the whole park, the tip of Roosevelt Island.
The park is one of the last works of the well-known American architect Louis Kahn, who in fact was holding the finished designs in his briefcase when he died from a heart attack at Penn Station in 1974. When the problems of the park’s inaccessibility arise – and city agencies also clashed with the Park Conservancy over these issues[4]– it is the fact that Kahn was designing before the ADA that is offered as the defense.
The Park’s blog introduced it as the “city’s largest pride flag.”[5] This designation was reported in almost every news media representation. The New York Post even reported that it is the largest pride flag in the city’s history, a bizarre error that erases the mile-long flags that were created for the 25thanniversary of the Stonewall riots in 1994.
The rainbow steps use a common six-color design, diverging from the 1978 eight-color design by Gilbert Baker and his under-acknowledged collaborators including Lynn Segerblom and James McNamara. The installation ignores more recent redesigns, like the work of the More Color More Pride campaign in Philadelphia in 2017 to recognize black and brown LGBTQ people and draw attention the prevailing whiteness of the work organized by the 1978 flag. It also ignores the 2018 campaign by designer Daniel Quasar to integrate the trans flag with black and brown stripes as a formal intervention into the 1978 design.
Left, the eight colors of the 1978 flag design and their assigned meanings. Middle, the 2017 More Color More Pride campaign redesign with black and brown stripes at the top. Right, Daniel Quasar’s 2018 redesign shows triangles with the trans flag colors with black and brown stripes intersecting from the left into the traditional flag design.
I think to better understand these choices about how the flag was installed, we have to focus on the fact that it was glued onto an enormous set of stairs and that those stairs are a semiotic play-space for nondisabled imaginations of progress. The F.D.R. Park flag was rolled out with the hashtag #AscendWithPride. You might already think of the many ways that social change is discussed in terms of bipedal movement: one step at a time, climbing or rising to new heights, and more.
What interests me is that the pride flag gets encased by public cultures about endurance and able-bodiedness that very often go unarticulated or taken as the status quo.
The rainbow steps, in this way, share a great deal with another major public installation, the Vessel at Hudson Yards designed by Thomas Heatherwick.
A photograph by Michael Moran shows the copper honeycomb of the Vessel from a distance.
The structure is just about all stairs: 2,500 individual steps are built into 154 flights of stairs connected by 80 landings.
A rendering of the inside of the Vessel shows all stairs and landings and hypothetical bipedal people scattered throughout.
I’ve written about the Vesseland a longer history of public performances of endurance. A new focus on endurance that developed in the 1970s U.S. public culture helps us understand the F.D.R. Park installation, too. And not only because Louis Kahn designed the Park in the same decade:
In the 1970s, marathons boomed around the United States. The number of entrants in the New York City Marathon surged roughly 10,000 percent. It’s also in the 1970s when hundreds of “thru-hikers” began attempting the full length of the Appalachian Trail in a single effort, part of what sport historian Adam Berg calls the “new strenuosity” in American culture.
And then there was the mosaic of community events that took up the marathon’s suffix during the dawn of the nonprofit-industrial complex: the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Association Telethon and the March of Dimes’ annual walkathons being two of the most popular forms. Jane Fonda goes from starring in the dance marathon drama They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? in 1969, which used an existential dread of endurance to characterize the Great Depression, to pioneering the at-home fitness boom with Jane Fonda’s Workout routines in 1981 and 82.
FDR Park was conceptually centered around FDR’s famous 1941 speech about “four freedoms”: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want,and freedom from fear. I want us to consider the possibility that this pride month installation does in fact ironically make good on at least one of those freedoms by demonstrating the extent to which stairs are a worshipping ground in American patriotism as a civic religion about autonomy and independence that systemically and profoundly excludes disabled people from the project.
And I want to draw our attention here to ways that pride projects, this one sponsored by Bloomberg, cooperate with ideas about ascendance and stair worship to produce an anti-intersectional thinking, missing a call to solidarity in the name of a vague and undefined idea of unity that must imagine a nondisabled subject at the center.
There are other cases to consider, ones that lead us away from rather than into ableism. The work of neuroqueer artists, activists, and academics are building ways for us to relish the kinds of complexities this case steps over.
A photograph by Rebirth Garments shows people dancing in an art gallery. Some use wheelchairs. Most are in brightly colored garments and bold makeup.
We could look at the work of Chicago-based artist Sky Cubacub, whose Rebirth Garments uses chainmaille as kinetic sculpture and soft armor for queer, nonbinary, and disabled bodies.
The cover of Melanie Yergeau’s book shows the title, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness and artwork by Dan Miller, a print of black, gray, and blue thatched lines.
We could look at the writing of Melanie Yergeau, who has theorized neuroqueerness as a category of identity and culture, where gender and sexuality cannot be thought apart from disability.
We’re at a moment when disability activists are taking up pride as an organizing principle. We just had thousands of people turn out for the 2019 Disability Pride Parade on July 14th. So we might pause to consider any patterns we notice about pride movements that are quick to cast off shame.
The pride flag stairs invite us to better understand the formof public installation: how the very materials being selected are assumed to communicate and how we can read them in terms of accessibility.
And I think this case leaves a desire for more interesting, more complicated kinds of celebration – or a desire for solidarity that can resist the tendencies toward monolithic identity categories.
Kevin Gotkin is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, & Communication at New York University.
[1]Lauren Berlant, “On the Case,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 4 (Summer 2007): 663.
[1]Ibid., 665.
[3] Eli Rosenberg, “Park Honoring Franklin Roosevelt Excludes Disabled People, Suit Says,” The New York Times, March 16th, 2017.
[4]Ibid.
[5]We’ll set aside the question about whether this installation is actually a flag, something typically activated by the wind.