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Wheelchair User Presses Protest Against Club

By Justin Rocket Silverman

AM New York, January 10, 2006

Most party people in this town have felt the pangs of rejection from being denied entry to a hip nightclub. But when bouncers told 21-year-old Michael Harris that he couldn't enter the Star nightclub with his wheelchair on New Year's Eve, they may have been breaking the law.

"They basically told me they had a policy not to admit people in wheelchairs," Harris said. "They told me that if I didn't leave they would pick me up and take me out of my wheelchair and throw me into the street."

Harris did not stick around to see if the bouncers were serious about the threat, but he did return to the club a short while later with a handmade sign to protest his treatment.

This past weekend, Harris was back at the Upper West Side club to stage another protest, and this time he was joined by City Council members Gail Brewer (D-Manhattan) and Melissa Mark Viverito (D-Manhattan), as well as fellow disabled activists.

"This issue goes beyond the legality of the situation to the morality of it," said Lawrence Carter-Long of the Disabilities Network of NYC, of which Harris is a member. "If this was any other minority group, we as a society would never accept this kind of discrimination, so why should we accept it for someone in a wheelchair?"

Star, like every other nightclub in the city, is under a legal obligation "to be handicap accessible, if it can reasonably be made accessible," according to Avery Mehlman, deputy commissioner of the city's Commission on Human Rights. Since many of New York's nightclubs are in older buildings that predate disabled access laws, they can avoid costly renovations by demonstrating that they would be a financial hardship.

"This is a basement nightclub and has been a club for 40 years," said Mark Glazer, a spokesman for Star. "Adding wheelchair access would cost upwards of $13,000, and that's more than this venue can afford."

Glazer admits the bouncers on New Year's Eve were "less than diplomatic" with the way they turned away Harris, and says Star's employees have since been given "sensitivity training." But he insists that it would have been unsafe to carry Harris' heavy motorized wheelchair down the staircase into the basement club.

Harris says he has hired a lawyer and will continue to protest his treatment, and wants to see Star install wheelchair access to the club.

"Even were they not to be required legally to do so, they should, because it is simply the right thing to do."