Accessibility of music venues in the Greater Boston Area
There are four local venues that do a particularly good job of providing accessible seating for people in wheelchairs. These include the local House of Blues, the Sinclair, the Paradise, and the City Winery. These venues go out of their way to be helpful.
At the House of Blues there is a great balcony with seating that you can use for most concerts. When shows do not have the balcony in use, because the size of the expected crowd is smaller, they provide you with a great location on the mezzanine level that works perfectly well but doesn’t have seating for other people with you. The staff here are very helpful. They also have good wheelchair accessible restrooms.
The Sinclair seats you in their balcony, which provides a great view of the show with nobody standing in front of you. They have also been willing to bring chairs for other people with me who needed them. The seating they provide is right in the middle of the balcony and works wonderfully because you can see the stage well and you are in front of everyone. They also have great wheelchair accessible bathroom facilities.
The Paradise is a much smaller venue than the other two. The way they accommodate you is somewhat different, but they do a great job dealing with people in wheelchairs. You get seated on the floor of the venue and they set aside an area right next to the stage for you to be seated with your party. You are seated right next to the stage, stage right.
Another small venue that does a good job is the relatively new City Winery, which has table seating that works great for wheelchair users. The bathrooms are also great.
Venues that could do a better job include the Rockland Bank Pavilion. This place asks Ticketmaster to sell only two seats together to wheelchair patrons, the rest of your party is seated in a nearby row, this is true even if you purchase tickets early. This is essentially discrimination again handicap patrons. This can be unsafe for some disabled patrons. There is no reason, whatsoever, for this limit on companion seating in since seating spaces that accommodate wheelchairs could have chairs placed in the space when not used by a wheelchair patron.
Another venue that could do a much better job is the Royale. Since it is owned and run by the same people who run the Sinclair I would expected them to do a better job than they do. This shows that protocols for helping handicap people are not even systematized within the same companies, but are likely considered within the purview of the venue managers. At the Royale I have been put in a place against the side wall where it is difficult to see the show and represents the worst seating available in the venue.
The TD Garden could also do a better job. This place unlike the other two does have some limitations that are the result of real physical limitations. Tiered seating does provide a real reason to place some limits on companion seats for people in wheelchairs because wheelchair users can only sit on tiers that are on the same levels as the elevator entrances and there are a limited number of seats available on these tiers. This venue has some limits based on the nature of the venue, given it has tiered seating.Even so, the Garden makes the situation worse by deciding to use a significant part of this tiered for standing room. Because of this use, the Garden imposes stricter limitations than would otherwise be necessary.
I hope this information is helpful for others who are handicap and want to enjoy good music in Boston. And if you agree, it would be great if you can help advocate for improved handicap accessibility at the venues that need serious improvement.There is one final venue in Cambridge that remains totally inaccessible, that venue is Passim which is one of the seminal folk music venues in the United States. It particularly drives me crazy not to be able to get in here because many years ago before I was limited to a wheelchair I used to spent a lot of my free time while in college hanging out here. I went to college at Tufts and a few friends and I used to work with Bob Donlin, the owner of the Club at that time to put on a series of larger venue folk shows at Tufts. I also once played with two friends as an opening act here. Passim is in a building owned by Harvard and so Harvard is responsible for its lack of access.
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