Carousel House families miss their old home, as Philly eyes a new rec center plan for people with disabilities

Theresa and Charles Perkins watched their son grow up at Carousel House. There, he became a young man, while surrounded by friends with physical and intellectual disabilities.

Zachary, now 21, is mostly nonverbal, his vocabulary limited to about a half dozen words. But make no mistake, he loved that place. Words were never needed to get that point across.

Constructed in 1987 on Belmont Avenue in West Philadelphia, Carousel House was something of a milestone at the time — a city-funded recreation center primarily for people with disabilities.

Movie nights. Bingo. Wheelchair sports. Music. Arts and crafts. Gym. Dances. Summer camp. Swimming. You could spend hours there, hit several programs in one day. The staff was well-trained. Regular visitors considered it like a second home, even if it had been neglected for years and needed a lot of work.

“It’s a community,” said Theresa Perkins, who lives in Olney. “They come together from different parts of the city.”

But in 2020, Carousel House closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Then, last year, news spread that it would be permanently shuttered due to what city officials said were unsafe conditions.

A “Save the Carousel House” protest followed, drawing about 100 people. It didn’t work. Nearly 18 months later, emotions are still raw. City officials have promised a state-of-the-art rec center to be built on the site, but that is likely years away.

The closure of this one facility, however, has triggered a more complex — and often polarizing — discussion within the disability community in all corners of the city.

Was Carousel House a mini-utopia? Or a throwback to an era of segregation and exclusion?

The new facility to be built there will no longer be reserved mainly for people with disabilities, but will be open to everyone, in line with the city’s long-term Rec for All inclusion plan aimed at making its 150 rec centers accessible to all residents.

The new approach reflects a national shift in attitudes, including within Mayor Jim Kenney’s administration and among local disability-rights advocates. They argue that a single-location model for such programs is no longer acceptable — particularly in Philadelphia, which has the highest disability rate among the largest U.S. cities.

“We would never say this about other identity groups: that the Black community can only go to that center, or LGBT community to that center. Why would we think it’s OK to say that about the disability community?” asked Roger Ideishi, a George Washington University professor with expertise in developmental disabilities and co-coordinator of the Philadelphia Chinatown Disability Advocacy Project.

» READ MORE: Will the closing of Philadelphia’s only rec center for people with disabilities lead to lasting inclusion? | Helen Ubiñas

But the Perkins family and other Carousel House families didn’t have those complaints. They saw it as a place where their children were safe and comfortable. Now, they feel as if they’re being dragged into a social inclusion experiment they never signed up for.

“As parents, we feel kind of out of sorts,” Charles Perkins said last week, as Zachary participated in a music therapy session that has been relocated to a rec center in East Falls. “If it’s going to be open to the entire community, we feel the special-needs community is going to be pushed aside.”

Theresa Perkins is also worried about the integration process and how it will affect her son and his friends.

She said, “I just don’t want them to get lost.”

Carousel House is awaiting demolition, rusting away behind a padlocked fence on a 5.2-acre site down the street from the Please Touch Museum in Parkside.

Even before Carousel’s closure was announced, the city was moving in a different direction. At a 2018 summit with disability advocates, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation Commissioner Kathryn Ott Lovell got an earful when she’d discussed renovations to the facility. Opponents wanted accessibility and similar programs at other rec centers, too.

Fran Fulton, a disability-rights activist, was one of the people who urged Ott Lovell to consider a more inclusive plan. The summit had a major impact on Ott Lovell’s approach.

“People with disabilities shouldn’t have to go to one place. That’s segregation, no matter how you look at it,” Fulton, who is blind and lives in Center City, said in an interview last week. “There is no doubt having people who know how to work with children and adults with different types of disabilities is an advantage. But it doesn’t have to be just Carousel House.”

Fulton, a plaintiff in a recent class-action lawsuit settlement that will require the city to install or fix at least 10,000 sidewalk curb ramps, said policies aimed at integration ultimately benefit both people with and without disabilities, particularly children. Otherwise, she said, kids can develop biases.

“That’s how prejudices are created,” she said. “By never being around someone with a disability, you think of them as inferior or children to be pitied.”

Gwenn Vilade, the director of inclusion for Parks and Rec, who started in the position in February, said the new Carousel House, when completed, will have all the same programs as before, and likely more.

“But we also want people to be able to participate in recreation with their siblings or their neighbors, so they have those opportunities in their neighborhoods,” Vilade said last week at the Gustine Center, where several programs from Carousel House had been relocated.

In the next room, participants in the program joined in with tambourines, drums, and shakers during an acoustic guitar version of Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” as part of a music therapy session. Vilade has been focused on building new partnerships to expand inclusive programs throughout the city.

“Things are a little different than back in the ’90s when the ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] was passed,” Vilade said. “There are people who maybe grew up going to a facility like Carousel House or a special school, but there are opportunities for inclusion now. Embracing those opportunities is kind of more of the norm.”

“The dream,” she added, “is for a child to be able to go to their neighborhood rec center down the street and be included, no matter if they have a disability or not.”

One problem with that plan is that it isn’t yet a reality, leaving people who went to Carousel House as a community in exile: Some programs are now at Gustine, but there is no swimming pool there. The wheelchair basketball league moved across the river to New Jersey. A monthly meeting for paralyzed gun-violence survivors was disbanded altogether.

“It’s a family that has been split apart and it hasn’t been put back together yet,” said Tamar Riley, president of the advisory council for Carousel House.

Riley, whose 41-year-old son had been going there since he was 12, said the council did not receive advance notice that the center would be permanently closed. She said she doesn’t think city officials grasped how important it was to so many people.

“Everyone was caring, nonjudgmental, and very supportive,” Riley said of Carousel House staff and participants. Now, she said, “it seems like we’re not a priority. It’s really sad.”

As the city moves forward with its Rec for All plan and away from a segregated facility, some Carousel House participants feel as if their own lived experience hasn’t been regarded.

“That inclusion process has excluded our community,” said Mike Martin, the treasurer of the advisory council, who has used a wheelchair for the last 30 years. “How about keeping this open until there are accessible centers in every other part of the city?”

Stu Greenberg, the former director of Carousel House, said some parents would not be comfortable dropping off children with special needs at other rec centers in high-crime areas of the city. He questioned whether the Kenney administration is pursuing a progressive agenda at the expense of families who preferred the existing system.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” said Greenberg, a former longtime Parks and Rec employee. “I have a lot of fond memories of that place. They stripped all those memories by closing it down.”

Joe and Roseanne Kirlin created a fund in their late daughter’s name to sponsor wheelchair events at Carousel House. Recently, they wrote an open letter to Kenney, saying that he and Commissioner Ott Lovell had “destroyed wheelchair sports in Philadelphia.”

The program, which produced dozens of college-level wheelchair basketball players and five Paralympic medalists, is based now at the RiverWinds Community Center in West Deptford, in Gloucester County.

Philadelphia officials insist that they wanted to keep Carousel House open until demolition began but said that wasn’t feasible. Even though the building was relatively new, they said, it needed millions of dollars in renovations due to years of deferred maintenance.

Erica Young-Carter, the Carousel House director who runs the relocated programs at the East Falls center, said she’s advising families to be patient as the city moves toward inclusion, anchored by a new Carousel House.

“We have to navigate through some tough times in order to get to the final destination, which is getting a brand-new building,” Young-Carter said. “It’s going to be an adjustment. Change is hard. No one likes change. But I try to keep my eye on the prize.”