Harper Rose Kligman Goldberg doesn’t want a pony or a 24-pack of Silly Bandz for her fifth birthday. What she wants is something that should really already be available to her. She wants to slide down the damn slide at the park near where she lives. Unfortunately, the playground there isn’t accessible.
Arbor Lodge Park is a decades-old park lacking ramps, with non-accessible features like a sand pit. Since Harper gets around in what she calls her “little crocodile” — her mobility device — like millions of disabled kids before her she’s gotta watch from the sidelines while the rest are having the best time ever.
So her family and hundreds of friendly Portlanders have been tossing their pennies into a fund that’ll go to revamping Arbor Lodge Park. And their goal is to reach $200,000 by Harper’s fifth birthday, which is coming up on June 8. You can donate here.
Playgrounds are covered under the ADA. Under federal law, most new playgrounds (even many private ones, like the ones at for-profit childcare centers) have to have certain accessible features, such as rubber ground surfaces rather than sand. But since Arbor Lodge has been around since the middle of the last century, it’s exempt. Which is totally wack, of course.
But then again, we live in a country that paid one of its contractors in Iraq $100 just to wash a bag of soldiers’ laundry. So there’s that.