A Family History of MOPD
In this image: Protesters in front of City Hall during the crucial towaway picket, January 24, 1967.
Now that Victor Calise has moved on, for the first time in nearly a decade the Commissioner spot in the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities (or MOPD) is open.
Mayor Eric Adams is taking community input into selecting Victor’s successor, and a series of public meetings on the history and future of the office recently concluded. So now is an appropriate time to take a look at the origins and formation of MOPD, the nation’s first permanent public body focused on issues faced by people with disabilities.
I have a unique insight into this story, because my parents, Julie and Mollie Shaw, were among the first to describe and push for what became the Mayor’s Office, and my father served as its second Director. For me, the story of MOPD is family history--and it is a story that takes us back to the very beginnings of the modern movement, in the early 1960s.
That’s when the pioneers of the New York City Disability Rights Movement first banded together. They dubbed themselves the Handicapped Drivers Association, and began lobbying for an exemption from having to pay parking meter fees. That may sound rather random, but just consider the vital importance of the automobile for people with disabilities in those days, when public transit was utterly out of the question for most of them. How could you go to a movie, let alone work a day’s shift somewhere, if the meter had to be replenished every hour or more? So this was an important issue, and it seemed reasonably winnable given the relatively small number of New Yorkers who held handicapped parking permits. But the idea proved no easy lift.
Nearly half a dozen years of pushing and lobbying followed, without success. But instead of giving up or fading away, the Handicapped Drivers Association developed an outreach and networking campaign that included the then-new Democratic Reform Movement. It enlisted as many disability groups as it possibly could, including the Joint Handicapped Council, the Long Island Chapter of the National Paraplegia Foundation, the Paralyzed Veterans of America, the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association, United Cerebral Palsy, the National Amputation Association, and Federation of the Handicapped. This massive coalition of disability groups all pulled together for the first time, to support an effort at real, lasting, statutory change in our society.
And on October 10, 1966, Mayor John Lindsay, then in his first year in office, signed into law the bill allowing disabled drivers to park free at meters throughout the City. It was the first law in New York State meant to protect a right special to people living with disabilities.
A few months later, on Tuesday, January 24, 1967, the new movement took to the streets with the first protest by people with disabilities in more than 20 years. It all got started just the day before, during the afternoon of January 23, when the disability community learned a crucial fact about a controversial new proposal for controlling traffic congestion in midtown. The City was going to prohibit all parking between 34th and 66th Street, and was going to towaway all illegally parked cars (this was the start of that infamous New York City practice). Despite objections from disability groups, among others, there were to be NO exceptions—not for doctors, not for diplomats, and not for cars driven by people with disabilities.
The crucial new fact was this: the new policy was going to start tomorrow morning.
In this image: The first page of Julie and Mollie Shaw’s proposal for what became MOPD, sent to City Hall in February 1967, shortly after the towaway picket.
A delegation of the Handicapped Drivers Association hurried down to City Hall to try to buttonhole policy makers, but the effort went nowhere. My parents were members of the Association, and our home phone rang until about two in morning, as people tried to come to grips with what awaited them the next day. What should they do? How could they get to work, or even leave their homes? The upshot, as Julie put it, was “since we can’t get to work, let’s all head downtown to ‘meet the Mayor.’” And so they did.
The towaway program attracted plenty of protest from doctors and diplomats, of course. But to the surprise of both the public and politicians, the biggest protest came from disabled drivers. The government and the press were just amazed by the sight of people picketing City Hall using crutches and wheelchairs. The protesters got heavy news coverage in the papers, radio, and TV. As the Daily News put it, “the tiger slipped out of Mayor Lindsay’s tank yesterday, firmly affixed hizzoner to its tail and dragged him bumping all over the mid-Manhattan tow-away zone as the biggest eruption of protests in his short-term administration hit City Hall. [The l]oudest blast came from the handicapped, who use their cars for work in the tow-away zone.”
The consequences of the towaway picket were far-reaching—among other things, it led directly to the formation of the Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, the forerunner of today’s MOPD.
My parents had been agitating for a City agency addressing disability issues even before the free-parking-at-meters bill was enacted. A series of letters on the subject passed between them and City Hall. To its credit, the Lindsay Administration responded receptively, but nothing concrete had happened.
The towaway fiasco, though--that was proof of the need for a City agency focused on disability issues. Julie and Mollie quickly sent Lindsay a detailed seven page document titled “Proposal for a New York City Agency to Deal with the Multi-Problems of the . . . Handicapped.”
The letters flowing out of our apartment noted that the numbers of people with disabilities were increasing (for a number of reasons, including improved health care that saved a lot of lives). But despite the growing career need for education, the surge of social legislation in the era of the Great Society, and the rise of civil rights activism by the nation’s Black citizens and all over the former colonial world, “no such movement exists for the handicapped except in the area of rehabilitation.” But “what is the social use of several billion dollars spent on rehabilitating disabled persons and training them for employment, if the structures where they might otherwise find work are . . . inaccessible?” And they observed, sadly, that as a result, “after rehabilitation comes frustration, failure and chaos. Emotional chaos. For the hope that arose is crushed, and is not to rise again.”
It isn’t easy to translate Mollie and Julie’s proposal into modern terms because so much has changed since then, but it was something like a combination of a public agency and an independent living center, a body that would act as both policy advocate and central clearing house for information, with a single overarching goal: “to secure and protect for handicapped citizens their right to function as members of a democratic society.”
Meanwhile, the Lindsay Administration had been severely embarrassed by the towaway fiasco, and in its aftermath there was real movement on Mollie and Julie Shaw’s proposal for “an agency to deal with the multi-problems of the handicapped.” Among other things, the proposal got pushed from inside the Administration by Joel Tyler, the Commissioner of what is now the Department of Consumer Affairs. He was a strong ally of Lindsay, and a polio survivor who walked with a severe limp. You may remember him from later in his career, after he became a judge, when he issued a judicial decision that declared the infamous film Deep Throat to be obscene.
In this image: The April 12, 1968, telegram that invited Julie Shaw to join the newly-created Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped.
By January 1968, a report on a Mayor’s Committee on the Handicapped was on the Mayor’s desk. Activists had been urging that such a Committee had to have membership from the disability community itself, and the Mayor evidently agreed, because on February 26, 1968, my father Julie was invited to serve on the new Mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Handicapped, one of seven members with disabilities.
The Mayor’s Advisory Committee (or MAC) was the first permanent public body anywhere whose mission was to focus on the issues faced by people with disabilities. The disability community was jubilant, absolutely ecstatic! In fact, 1968 turned out to be a pivotal year for the new movement. In addition to the new advisory committee, the community won important accessibility amendments to the Building Code, and an amendment to the City’s Human Rights Law that prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities. It was the first such law anywhere, ever. Suddenly the newly energized community wasn’t just agitating to be heard. It had an institutional portal giving them a seat at the table, and laws they could use to pound the table.
Or at least, that’s how it looked.
But MAC turned out to be mostly a dud. The Executive Order creating the Committee put it under the control of the Office of the Personnel Director, and it gave HIM the authority to do the Committee’s work—things like identifying suitable types of employment, developing training programs, and liaising with other agencies. Practically speaking, most of that got delegated to MAC, but its Chairman, Commissioner Tyler, called very few meetings, and not much happened--until 1970, when the City created a new position of Coordinator, and brought in a dynamic blind social worker named Eunice Fiorito to take charge.
Eunice isn’t much remembered by the disability community, and that’s really unfortunate, because she was a powerhouse—brilliant, charismatic, simultaneously charming and a tireless pain in the rear. Eunice harangued Lindsay into signing Executive Order 81 of June 29, 1973, which upgraded MAC into the Mayor’s Office for the Handicapped, or MOH, complete with letterhead, an accessible office space at 250 Broadway, and a storefront at 61 Chambers that was open to the public.
The new Executive Order provided that MOH had responsibility to develop City policy and to act as a public spokesman for the community, to communicate with the Mayor and public and private agencies and the community at large, to propose City and State legislation, to compile data, conduct research and projects, and to provide service referrals.
That all sounded pretty good. Eunice became the first Director, and she described the new office enthusiastically: “its role is to prick the conscience of city agencies to be responsive to the needs of handicapped individuals. Once we have done this, we have to be available to provide ongoing encouragement and technical assistance.”
The importance of MOH was universally understood within the community. As Eunice put it in the Office’s first Annual Report, this “is not merely the annual report of another government authority. It represents . . . the history of a social movement.”
But the fact was that MOH’s office consisted of just two rooms, with a staff of fifteen, including her. Worse, MOH had no “lines,” that is, no assigned personnel. Every single staffer was “on loan” from other agencies. As Deputy Director Larry Allison put it, “we are an executive order agency, which means that the Mayor, if he wishes to get rid of us in us in a fit of pique, can issue an executive order dissolving us.” So the new office had no inherent power.
But Eunice had something of a habit of getting very in-your-face with her employers, and in the spring of 1974 she pulled one of her biggest stunts (and gave the Mayor’s Office its most radical moment ever, so far). It was the era of the OPEC Oil Embargo, when gas supplies collapsed around the country almost overnight. The State of New York adopted a fuel rationing program that really screwed disabled motorists, not out of hostility, but out of willful ignorance. In response, Eunice helped plan and coordinate a massive demonstration in front of Governor Malcolm Wilson’s offices at 52nd and Sixth, and after getting rebuffed by the Governor’s staff, the protesters went out into traffic and blocked Sixth Avenue for hours, in the middle of a workday, WITHOUT a permit!
The Gas Demo was a huge media event. Interviews and news helicopters gave it national coverage. For the demonstrators it was a moment of tremendous glee—a real party. I was there that day, a sophomore in high school. I thought of it then, and I still think of it, as the Disabled People’s Woodstock.
But Mayor Abraham Beame—who was having plenty of other political troubles—was absolutely furious with Eunice, and that didn’t mean anything good for the office that she headed. In fact, given the Fiscal Crisis, it was all Eunice could do to rally the community to stop MOH from being defunded and dissolved.
In this image: Photograph of the inaugural run of the City Hall elevator, December 27, 1978. Pictured from left to right are Mayor Abe Beame, City Council Majority Leader Tom Cuite, Julius Shaw, John T. Carroll, Eunice Fiorito.
In 1978, after Ed Koch got elected Mayor, Eunice put in her notice. Julie was an obvious choice for successor. The community formed a screening committee and interviewed ten candidates, finally submitting a list of three names. Julie got the nod.
Not long after came what we at home always called the “coronation,” Julie’s confirmation as Director. It was supposed to be a small ceremony in an off-room at City Hall, but so many people RSVP’d that they had to move it into the big City Council chamber. And the reason that the whole business could even take place in the seat of City government is because of one of MOH’s most important accomplishments—the City Hall elevator, a joint project of Eunice and Julie which had opened the previous December.
Mayor Ed Koch spoke first, describing Julie, accurately enough, as a “doer, a leader, and a fighter.” When he finished, my father rolled up to the microphone—then he threw his arms akimbo, as if announcing to the community “HERE I AM!” And the place just exploded. The applause seemed to go on and on and on, in wave after wave, until Julie had to quiet everyone down so the ceremony could continue.
But you know, once he had the job, he found it kind of disappointing. Perhaps because of Eunice’s role in the Gas Demo, Julie found that any initiative he proposed required approval of not one but TWO Deputy Mayors, so he wasn’t just on a short leash, but TWO short leashes. Yet MOH had responsibility to coordinate the entire City’s response to the mandates of section 504 of the Rehab Act of 1973, to play the role of watchdog and instructor of all the agencies whose non-compliance could cost the City federal funding that was desperately needed in those Fiscal Crisis days.
As far as affirmative accomplishments, there were a few reports and conferences, and a successful jobs fair. But that’s about it. Julie found that he actually had less power than he had had outside, as an agitator. Inside work, Julie decided, was not to his liking. And so after just a year in the job, he retired. His successor was Tony Santiago.
In conclusion, the agency now called MOPD has in fact taken on responsibility for coordinating City policy. It regularly interacts with the State and private bodies, particularly with respect to legislation and best accessibility practices, as to which it has considerable expertise. Its most important accomplishments include, of course, the elevator in City Hall, which allowed the community to participate in decision-making instead of having to sit outside making noise, and Local Law 58 of 1987 (principally drafted by MOH Directors Carol Ann Roberson and Mark Leeds), which dramatically improved accessibility in our City. MOPD has partnered on ventures significant to the community, including the Disability Pride Parades and festivals of recent years, the Disability Unite organization, and the first and only museum exhibit on the City’s Disability Rights Movement (curated by Yours Truly). And it has occasionally been controversial, as when Director Anne Emerman tried to block Mother Theresa’s plan to build a non-accessible shelter for homeless people.
Our movement is the work of generations, past, present and future. It will be most fascinating to see what MOPD’s next Commissioner adds to the story.
Note: A version of this essay appeared in Able News
by Warren Shaw
