Within the disability community, Frieda Zames was a star. Known for her dazzling smile and her pointed advocacy, Zames, a motorized scooter user, lobbied and often irritated City officials—particularly on issues affecting wheelchair access to City buses and ferryboats, and around Local Law 58 of 1987, a wide-ranging accessibility statute that builders sometimes refer to as the “City ADA” (Americans with Disabilities Act).
Less famous, perhaps, was Zames’s career as a scholar. She held a doctorate in mathematics and was a longtime professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark. Together with her sister Doris, in 2001 Zames published “The Disability Rights Movement: From Charity to Confrontation.” Generally described as an historical survey of the movement, it is an ambitious and laudable treatment of the entire national story, to that time.
Zames was born in 1932 and contracted polio at the age of three. Institutionalized for many years, Zames was largely self-taught, yet she graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brooklyn College, and in her early career supported her family by working as an actuary. In the 1970s she began attending protests, and soon enough found herself on the boards of directors of Disabled In Action, the New York State Independent Living Coalition, the Disabilities Network of NYC, and the radio station WBAI. In 1978 she won the George Polya Award of the Mathematical Association of America, for a paper on the so called Schwarz Lantern, a polyhedral approximation of a cylinder.
Close friends with Anne Emerman, former Director of the Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, Zames, along with her partner Michael Imperiale (a well-known raconteur and character in his own right), was a member of the Disabled In Action Singers. I got to know her in 2001, while recording and mixing the group’s second CD. I was deeply touched when, unasked, she autographed a copy of her history book and handed it to me.
After her death in 2005, the corner of her longtime home, at First Avenue and East 4th Street, was officially re-named Frieda Zames Way—honoring the legacy of an advocate who truly shaped disability rights in New York.
Read all 35 stories of the New York-based leaders profiled in our ADA 35 edition.