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New York was named one of the top four cities to live in by the American Foundation for the Blind the other day, and, in honor of the official bestowal of an A.F.B. Livable Community Award, there was a re-creation of the very first time a guide dog led a blind man across a street, in New York City seventy-five years ago. Livability-wise, New York ranked just behind Charlotte, Berkeley, and Kalamazoo, but it beat out La Crosse, Wisconsin, which is more impressive than it sounds: even though most non-blind New Yorkers can't imagine living anywhere else, they tend not to think of New York as being livable, exactly.
On a recent sunny morning, Jywanza Maye and RoseMarie McCaffery, co-workers at the Associated Blind, on William Street, were on their way to the livability-award ceremony, at the corner of West and Chambers Streets. They were in full agreement that New York deserved its high ranking, though they disagreed on how to get over there. RoseMarie favored the M22 bus.
"Why don't we take the subway?" Jywanza asked.
"I don't do subways," RoseMarie said.
Jywanza, who is in his twenties and was dressed in jeans and a cool leather cap, extolled New York's livability as his guide dog, Bentley, lunged at the end of his leash. "I've even been to Charlotte, and I think New York's the best city to get around," Jywanza said. "I mean, first, the subways are 24/7, so I don't have to say at midnight, 'Oh, I'm blind. I gotta get a cab.' "
On the M22, RoseMarie, who is in her fifties and was dressed in a dark business suit (her guide dog's name is Iliad), talked about the first American guide dog crossing West Street--its nickname was Death Street at the time--from the piers, in 1928. Newspaper reporters had dared a nineteen-year-old named Morris Frank, who had gone to Switzerland to get a guide dog--there were none in the United States at the time--to step into the traffic. Frank recounted the scene in his autobiography, "First Lady of the Seeing Eye" (one in a long line of such memoirs, among them Hector Chevigny's "My ...