Center Park
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Center Park was built in the 1960's by Ida May Daly, a very progressive white woman who had severe multiple sclerosis. She purchased an area of inexpensive land in a white, Catholic neighborhood that was slowly changing into a black, Protestant neighborhood called the Rainier Valley area, of Seattle, Washington. It is a very large seven story building, built out of cinder blocks, that provides living accommodation to physically challenged or mentally challenged individuals and their caretakers. Neighborhood buses run fairly frequently throughout the area.
The building has a large recreation room that operates as a hub for local events and sometimes functions as a voting station. Besides the recreation room, another key area frequented by the building's residents is the stone garden down in a cove near the building. Center Park has over 100 independent living units, an office to assist those who have any trouble in their day to day living, and a free meals program (offering three meals per day in the cafeteria and is accessible to those of low income.)
One of the main difficulties that plagues Center Park is a tremendously long waiting list that stems from the entire world seemingly attempting to enter it, and there are a number of disadvantaged people in the area that currently seek assistance. Perhaps more such buildings should be made available for the disadvantaged, but this is open to debate. Center Park remains one of the few such buildings that are almost completely wheelchair accessible.
Several of the disabled people who lived at Center Park also got together in the late 1970s and early 1980s and helped to put better wheelchair lifts on the Metro buses. They did this by pointing out how the wheelchair lifts needed to be altered and made better, by staging acts of daring involving using the wrong kinds of "folding camel" lifts and pointing out that they could be easily broken and otherwise that there needed to be better wheelchair lifts--by riding the old lifts and breaking them. Strangely enough, this actually happened. They risked their lives in earnest pursuit of the desire to make it doable for some nearly immobile people to become more mobile, go out in public, and have access to better lives, work and recreation of their own choosing without too much support from able-bodied people. This was done through a coalition effort between the able-bodied, the disabled, and the manufacturer of the better-working wheelchair lifts.
