By Ben Joravsky
The city won’t say why the door’s locked, on the grounds that the issue’s in court. In 1998 Meeker filed a federal lawsuit that accuses the city of “refusing to accommodate [him] by permitting handicapped accessibility to the work place immediately adjacent to the parking space” and of “failing to provide [him] with a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for failing to promote him.” He’s seeking unspecified damages for the “loss of pay he would have earned had he been…promoted” and for “physical pain and suffering [and] mental and emotional distress, humiliation, inconvenience and loss of enjoyment of life.”
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In some respects, Meeker’s an unlikely character to be found at odds with the city. His father, Willard Meeker, was a firefighter, as were several cousins and uncles. “My father married into a firefighting family. My mother’s father and grandfather worked for the department,” Meeker says. “I wanted to be a fireman too. That was my dream. That’s all I ever really wanted to do.”
In 1980 he was promoted to dispatcher and sent to work at the department’s south-side ambulance dispatch office at 63rd and Wentworth. “The building wasn’t accessible, but I told them, ‘I can handle the job, let me worry about the building,’” says Meeker. “My father and another fireman built a wooden ramp so I could get in–everything was fine. I had no reason to believe I couldn’t rise to the top.”
In the winter of 1997 he formally asked the city to open the door for him, sending what’s called a “reasonable accommodation” request to police chief Matt Rodriguez. But Rodriguez denied his request. So he called Larry Gorski, who heads the mayor’s office of disabilities and uses a wheelchair himself. “And he says, ‘We’ll put you on the street,’ meaning I could park my van on Madison,” says Meeker. “I said, ‘No, the street isn’t gonna do it. My lift won’t deploy there because the street grade’s not right.’ He said, ‘It’s my decision that you don’t need to use the disabled entrance. I don’t need to use it.’ Well, of course he doesn’t have any trouble–he has an aide that pushes him around. I’m not that fortunate. Madison Street is sloped and the sidewalk’s sloped. And besides, it’s a snow route. What am I gonna do in the winter when I park my van and come back to find that it’s been towed and I have to pay $115 to get it out?”
Dolan says the case could come to trial this summer. In the meantime, Meeker continues to wheel past the disabled entrance. “Now they have this rock statue on the plaza I have to navigate by, as if it wasn’t hard enough already,” he says. “I’ve dedicated myself to making something meaningful out of my life. But the city’s dedicated itself to making my life miserable.”
