If anyone wanted to attend the Universal Design conference in New York
City Oct. 18-20, 2001, held at the state University of NY's Manhattan
campus (plug - I'm speaking at it and conducting a tour of "UD"-related
sites in the neighborhood Saturday) ...conference's web site is
www.fitnyc.udu/universaldesign
... but could not afford the total cost -- an announcement in the media
today suggests that there seems to be a possibility that you might get
the AIRFARE to New York for FREE.
Delta Airlines www.delta.com announced today that in the next six months
they'll be giving away free, ten thousand round trip tickets to New York
City, to help restart the city's tourist economy after the attack that
destroyed the World Trade Center. They're also offering other
miscellaneous deals on cheaper hotels and letting frequent flyer miles
count for more than before. On their Home Page, on the vertical list of
items on the right, click on "Delta Loves New York". This special
offer's exact page address is:
www.delta.com/travel/sp_offers/nyc.100201/index/jsp Their toll free
phone numbers are - customer service 888-750-3284, domestic reservations
800-221-1212, international reservations 800-241-4141. It is not clear
from the first day's web page announcement on this, if this free ticket
offer applies only to flights within the US, or to international flights
to New York City, too. Ask!
If you fly to this conference, of the three airports serving NYC, the
most convenient one to pick is Newark "NWK". This is a short bus ride
to Newark Penn Station, which has accessible and cheap (a few dollars)
commuter trains that take you to a point in Manhattan (New York's Penn
Station) which is just four "short blocks" away from the conference's
site. (Access Detail - If you need the elevator in New York, tell the
train's conductor, and they'll phone ahead from the train to make sure
that they arrive at a platform where the elevator is working. And when
leaving, tell dispatcher you want him / her to verify that it will leave
from a platform whose elevator is working. Generally everything's
working, but sometimes there is one broken elevator in the building.
Same procedure for going the other way.)
Cheaper hotel rooms just twenty minutes away from the conference site,
might be found at a hotel across the street from that train station in
Newark, the Newark Hilton, which has 11 rooms with accessible type
bathrooms. (It is connected by a pedestrian bridge to the Newark Penn
Station train station.) The NYC hotels are less booked than usual now,
due to many people not travelling all over the US... and so lots of them
may have much cheaper than usual rates now, not just the ones in that
Delta Airlines promotion whose details are not entirely out, today, as
of this writing.
The conference, called:
International Symposium on Universal Design
"Integrating Differences: Theories and Applications of Universal
Design",
... will be held at the Manhattan Campus of the State University of New
York's "FIT", the Fashion Institute of Technology. Though the
conference will mostly cover new research and practices in the usual
architectural and industrial (product) design areas.... there will also
be one or two innovative presentations on how universal design applies
to clothing design. The address is Seventh Avenue at 27th St. (NYC's
Penn Station is at Seventh Ave. from 31st to 33rd Sts.).
The main feature of my universal design examples tour in the
neighborhood will be the Observation Platform of the Empire State
Building, which is just two "long blocks" away to the east. This famous
public facility (seen in many movies) was made accessible in many of
it's details, due to the first ever ADA / Americans with Disabilities
Act lawsuit concerning building access, which was filed by Disabled In
Action of Metropolitan New York. Another stop on this "UD Site" tour
within a 3 block radius of the campus, will be long-sought new outdoor
coin-operated toilets which are more or less "UD", (plus two more sites
-- the exterior of the giant Post Office where the train station will
expand into -- the topic of my described slide lecture on the disabled
public-input process I organized to get features beyond the minimum
requirements of the ADA -- and on the way, we'll pass a new storefront
design that illustrates the city's failure to enforce the accessibility
part of it's building code).
When registering for the conference, the Tour registration is a separate
"extra" thing; be sure not to overlook it.
Now that the observation platform at the World Trade Center is gone, the
nearly as high Observation Deck (which has just reopened on weekends
only, due to security concerns) at the Empire State Building is quite a
hot ticket. A tour like ours may be the only way to get to see it
quickly, without the hour or two of waiting which most ticket buyers
have to go through. (Like the airlines, the ESB's Observation Deck is
requiring "government issued photo identification " now. If you work
for a state university, I don't know if that kind of photo ID counts.
Best to bring driver's license, non-driver's equivalent, or passport.)
The urban campus site of the conference is a campus at the edge of New
York's fashion district. FIT / SUNY is also at the northern edge of
Chelsea, the area that many of the art galleries have moved to in the
last 4 years, to get larger spaces. Chelsea also has many restaurants,
but not too many hotels (the hotels are closer to the campus). The
Seventh Avenue Subway Stop at nearby 34th St. (the #2 or 3 Express
trains, but not the #1 & 9 "Local" ones) has a platform elevator, though
the gap to the train car, sideways and sometimes up and down too, may be
a problem), and the 8th Ave train does not have an elevator at this
stop). All the streets, and busses (the fully accessible part of NYC's
mass transit) in the FIT / SUNY Campus area are fully functioning; as
the disaster site is about two miles to the south.
The conference's information phone number is 212--217--3241.
--
If anyone from this DIS-RES discussion board is able to attend, please
look me up; I'd like to meet you. (At the conference my cell phone
number will be 347-528-6832, my pager is 917-737-0132).
Jim Davis
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