The Golden Age of Deafness: 1991, Tanya Towers, and the Long Erosion After

There was a year, exact and bounded, when the world we built held together. 1991. David and I had just celebrated our third wedding anniversary. He had finished his MFA at Columbia that spring under Peter Stone. I had just started teaching ASL at New York University, where I have now taught for thirty-five years. I had come east from Iowa, where I attended the Iowa School for the Deaf from first grade through twelfth, and from CUNY Lehman, where I would graduate the following spring as the first Deaf graduate in the school’s history. We were in our twenties and newly credentialed, and we felt as if we owned every inch of the city.

We lived at Tanya Towers, 620 East 13th Street, on the eastern edge of Alphabet City, a neighborhood the city had largely abandoned to broken needles and broken streetlamps. Outside the tower you walked past Avenue C with your hand near a pocket. Inside, the air was different. Doorbells lit up. Fire alarms strobed. Apartment buzzers flashed white from the kitchen ceiling. Every staff member at the front desk signed. Every neighbor in the elevator signed. You could ride from the tenth floor to the lobby and finish a conversation begun on the way up. The building had been built for us. We lived inside our own language, finally and at home, and for a brief season after the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in the summer of 1990 and the Television Decoder Circuitry Act took its first regulatory shape, the law and the architecture and the community ran in the same direction at the same time.

I want to write down what that year was, and what came after. The people who lived through 1991 are aging out of the cultural memory of the community, and the people inheriting Deaf life in 2026 have never seen what we had. The argument of this essay is direct. 1991 was a peak we have not approached since. The conditions that made it possible have all weakened or vanished. The replacement we live inside now flatters itself with the vocabulary of progress while delivering less than 1991 already had.

The Years Before

You cannot understand 1991 without standing inside the years that produced it. For most of the twentieth century, a Deaf person in the United States made a phone call by walking next door and asking a hearing neighbor to dial for her. Doctors’ appointments were arranged in person. School notices were delivered by mail and explained, often badly, by hearing relatives. The teletypewriter (TTY), developed by the Deaf physicist Robert Weitbrecht in 1964 and gradually adopted across Deaf households through the 1970s, broke that dependency for those who could afford a machine and find another TTY at the receiving end. By the late 1980s the device was common in Deaf households across the country, but it did not transform the larger architecture of access. A Deaf woman in 1985 was still mostly invisible to her bank, her child’s pediatrician, and her own city government. Qualified interpreters existed in scattered numbers. Captioning was an experiment carried on a handful of PBS broadcasts. Mainstream television, almost everywhere, was an unreadable picture accompanied by the daily reminder that the country was sharing a joke you would never be told.

Then came the week of March 6 through March 13, 1988. At Gallaudet University in Washington, a seventeen-member board of trustees (only four of whom were Deaf) chose a hearing administrator who could not sign over two qualified Deaf candidates for the presidency of the world’s only liberal-arts university for Deaf students. The students locked the gates. They burned effigies on the campus quadrangle. They marched to the Capitol. By March 13 they had won every demand: a Deaf president in I. King Jordan, a Deaf-majority board, no reprisals against the protesters, and the resignation of board chair Jane Bassett Spilman. The protest was called Deaf President Now. We had a slogan, a victory, a national audience, and for the first time the cultural argument that we were a linguistic minority instead of a medical defect reached television sets and editorial pages in the rest of the country. David and I were dating that spring. I remember watching the coverage on captioned PBS rebroadcasts and feeling, perhaps for the first time as an adult, that the Deaf community had moved from defending its existence to claiming a future.

The political momentum from DPN fed directly into the disability rights coalition that produced the Americans with Disabilities Act two years later. President George H. W. Bush signed the ADA into law on July 26, 1990. The Television Decoder Circuitry Act followed on October 15 of the same year, requiring all televisions thirteen inches or larger sold in the United States to contain built-in decoder circuitry capable of displaying closed captions. The Federal Communications Commission codified the implementing rules during 1991, and the built-in decoder requirement for new sets took effect July 1, 1993. Telecommunications relay services arrived under ADA Title IV. The interpreter mandate was suddenly real, written into Titles II and III. We were, briefly, a federally recognized people.

The Golden Year

1991 was the year the new law had been signed and the old culture had not yet begun to dissolve. Tanya Towers worked the way a residence built for a Deaf population should work. NYSD ran the building under a partnership with the city’s Mitchell-Lama housing program. The agency itself had been built by Tanya Nash. A Russian Jewish immigrant, she took over the Society for the Welfare of the Jewish Deaf from her late husband Charles in 1932 and led what became NYSD across the next half-century, until her death in July 1987. The building she opened in 1973, named for her, still ran in 1991 on the cultural infrastructure she had set in place. The lobby served as a meeting hall and the community room as a gathering point. Older residents played cards there in the afternoons and lectured anybody who would sit down about what the city used to be. The building itself housed only Deaf adults, but children passed through it constantly. Deaf grandchildren visited grandparents who lived upstairs. Young Deaf couples brought babies through the doors for the family nights NYSD programmed in the community room. On those Friday evenings we were every age at once, all signing, all looking at each other, all in the same room.

The cochlear implant had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for children two years of age and older in June 1990, only months before 1991 began. The technology existed and the regulatory clearance existed, but the infrastructure of audiologists, surgeons, speech-language pathologists, insurance pathways, and parent-counseling industries that would later turn implantation into the medical default for any infant flagged by the newborn hearing screen had not yet been built. Deaf children in 1991 were still being raised Deaf. Deaf parents in 1991 still found other Deaf parents at NYSD family nights, where the community room held every generation present at the same time and the only language in the air was the one our hands made.

I worked for NYSD during that period, under the executive direction of Joel Ziev. Joel hired me. He gave me my first major position in New York City Deaf services and trusted me with work that mattered. He was an ally, a friend, and a leader who believed in the cultural argument the agency existed to serve. NYSD ran Tanya Towers along with the Forsyth Street Individual Residential Alternative for Deaf adults with mental health needs, vocational counseling, adapted mental health services for Deaf clients, recreation programs, and the family nights I keep returning to in this essay. The collapse was nowhere in our sight lines in 1991. I walked to work each morning through an East Village that was both my workplace and my neighborhood, and came back each evening to David and to neighbors I shared a language with.

Television, briefly, opened up. The Television Decoder Circuitry Act made it federal policy that Deaf viewers would no longer be locked out of their own televisions. The decoder chip was small and inexpensive. Manufacturers had stalled for years on adding it voluntarily, and the law forced their hand. Movie theaters followed more slowly. Open-captioned screenings became a normal feature of programming in major cities through the early 1990s, and we could finally sit in a theater on a Friday night with hearing friends and follow what every other audience member was following. The Telecommunications Accessibility Enhancement Act of 1988 had already standardized the TTY as the federal communication device for Deaf citizens; relay services, gathering speed under what would become ADA Title IV by July 1993, gave us access to any hearing telephone in the country. A Deaf adult could now call a doctor’s office, a landlord, a bank, or a city agency, and a trained communication assistant would relay every word.

Interpreters were newly mandated under ADA Title II for state and local government and Title III for places of public accommodation. The supply was thin. The pool of nationally certified working interpreters was nowhere near large enough to cover the demand the new law generated. Even so, the principle had been written into federal law, and a Deaf person walking into a hospital in 1991 could request and increasingly receive a qualified interpreter without paying for the service herself. The principle was new. We believed it would keep working. Often enough, it did.

What did we have in 1991? A building, a neighborhood concentration of Deaf households, an executive director who fought for the community he ran, a federal civil rights statute fresh in its first months of enforcement, a captioning law that had just passed and whose technical rules were being codified, a generation of Deaf children still being raised Deaf, a community room that held three generations on a Friday night, an interpreter pool that was small but growing fast, and a sense, finally, that the country had agreed to see us. The architecture, the law, and the people stood in the same room. David and I rode the elevator each morning past neighbors whose hands moved in the same shapes ours did. The city was outside the window. Our marriage was new. The work was new. The law was new. Nothing yet had begun to recede.

The Long Erosion

The slide began in the late 1990s and accelerated through every decade after. What was taken from us was not taken in a single piece of legislation or a single court ruling. The erosion was distributed across medicine, technology, real estate, nonprofit governance, and cultural fashion, and each of those domains contributed its own small subtraction to a sum that, by the mid-2020s, had emptied most of what 1991 had filled.

Medicine moved first. The FDA expanded cochlear implant candidacy for children to eighteen months in 1998, twelve months in 2000, and nine months in 2020. Universal newborn hearing screening rolled out across U.S. hospitals through the late 1990s and 2000s. By the early 2010s almost every infant in a major American hospital was tested for hearing loss within forty-eight hours of birth, and a positive screen triggered an audiology referral that, far more often than not, terminated in a surgical recommendation. Hearing parents of deaf newborns, faced with a medical industry that presented implantation as the responsible choice, made that choice in overwhelming numbers. The implant rate among deaf children in the United States climbed from a trickle in 1990 to a substantial majority of candidates by the late 2010s. The cultural consequence was severe. Children who would have entered the Deaf community in 1991, the children at NYSD family nights, the children running through the Tanya Towers lobby, were instead raised in spoken-language environments with implants in their skulls and were largely lost to the community their grandparents had built.

I anticipate the obvious objections. The cochlear implant gives deaf children access to a hearing world. Many implanted children succeed in mainstream schools and lead full lives. Some Deaf adults choose implants for themselves and are happy with them. None of this contradicts the cultural argument I am making. The cultural question concerns the default, the path of least medical and parental resistance when an infant is flagged by a newborn hearing screen. Audiology referrals now terminate almost automatically in a surgical recommendation. Parents of deaf newborns are rarely offered a serious presentation of Deaf cultural life as a viable alternative. I treated this pipeline at greater length in my recent piece on the Aladdin matinee, where the empty Deaf children’s seating block made the demographic argument better than any statistic. The technology has become a presumption, and the presumption empties the community.

The technology that had gathered us in 1991, the architecture of flashing lights and shared TTYs, dispersed us into private devices across the next two decades. Two-way pagers arrived in the late 1990s. The Motorola T-900 was followed by the T-Mobile Sidekick, then the BlackBerry, then the iPhone, and at every step the Deaf community was an enthusiastic early adopter because each new device made our independent communication faster, cheaper, and more portable. We loved the technology. Many of us still do. What we did not see, and what I am willing now to say out loud, is that every step in the device revolution dispersed a community that had previously gathered in lobbies and community rooms. The TTY required two people in two places at two predictable times. A pager required only that you carry the device. A Sidekick required that you sit alone on a subway car. The iPhone requires nothing at all. We stopped needing each other to make a phone call, and we stopped meeting each other at the building where the phones used to be.

I anticipate also the response that the Deaf community has not vanished, that it has merely migrated online, where TikTok and YouTube and Instagram now carry Deaf content to audiences my generation could not have imagined. Online Deaf community has grown substantially over the past two decades. The audiences are large, the content is rich, and the cultural work performed there is real. I have no interest in dismissing it. The precise difference my argument depends on is this: an online audience does not gather across three generations in physical space on a Friday night. The community room at Tanya Towers had elderly Deaf residents lecturing teenage Deaf grandchildren in ASL. TikTok does not do this. A two-year-old deaf child in a hearing family does not learn ASL from her grandmother on Instagram. She learns it, if she learns it at all, from a community that comes to her in person. The disappearance of that physical, multigenerational, gathered community is what no online network has yet replaced.

NYSD weakened across the 1990s and 2000s. Joel was eventually pushed out by an internal faction I will not name in this essay, an ouster I never made peace with. By 2006 the agency had merged into FEGS Health and Human Services, a much larger nonprofit with no Deaf-led history. In 2015 FEGS itself collapsed into bankruptcy, leaving 1,900 employees jobless and roughly 120,000 clients across New York City stranded. Tanya Towers passed to the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, where its remaining Deaf residents are now governed by an organization whose mission is mental health services for all New Yorkers and whose ASL fluency, while present in some staff, is a feature rather than the operating architecture. The building still stands at 620 East 13th Street, the lights still flash from every kitchen ceiling, and the Deaf concentration is gone. About half the tenants today are hearing, by recent accounts, and the proportion has been rising for years.

The neighborhood changed too. Alphabet City in 1991 was dangerous and abandoned; in 2026 it is a real estate market. The luxury condominium developments that filled in around Tanya Towers across the 2000s and 2010s priced Deaf middle-income households out of the surrounding blocks. Younger Deaf adults who might once have moved into the area to be near the building, near the community, near NYSD, settled instead in outer-borough zip codes where Deaf concentration is statistically nonexistent. Tanya Towers, once the spine of a neighborhood-scale Deaf community, operates today as a single accessible address inside a luxury district.

Television, which the Decoder Circuitry Act briefly delivered to us, fragmented across streaming services where caption quality is wildly uneven. Captions on Netflix are usually clean. Captions on smaller services often are not. Live captioning, generated automatically, fills the screen with errors ranging from comic to dangerous. The Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 extended captioning requirements to internet-delivered video, but enforcement has been slow and quality has been poor. A Deaf viewer in 1992 watching a captioned PBS broadcast received cleaner text than a Deaf viewer in 2026 watching an auto-generated stream on a third-rate platform.

Open captioning in movie theaters, briefly normal in the 1990s, was largely abandoned in the 2000s in favor of personal captioning devices: the small reflective screen that clips to a cup holder and shows the captions only to the user. The devices broke constantly. Theater staff did not maintain them. By the late 2010s the major chains had moved on to a still-newer approach, the small handheld captioning unit, with its own constant failures. The retreat from open captions back to private workarounds was a retreat from public access toward unreliable individual fixes.

The Americans with Disabilities Act itself, the law that was supposed to be the constitutional foundation of accessible American life, has been hollowed out as a practical matter. ADA Title III lawsuits reached over 8,800 federal filings in 2024, a record, according to legal tracking by Seyfarth Shaw. Most of those complaints concern accessibility violations that the businesses involved knew about and chose not to fix. The compliance culture that the early 1990s had promised, in which businesses would understand the new legal landscape and adapt to it, has been replaced by a litigation culture. A substantial number of small, mid-size, and large American businesses now calculate the probability of being sued, weigh it against the cost of compliance, and decide to wait for the lawsuit. The Department of Justice under the second Trump administration has signaled, in its published guidance and its 2025 enforcement priorities, that it will not pursue ADA Title III enforcement aggressively. Private enforcement, which the ADA was always partly designed to depend on, has become the primary mechanism for any actual accessibility progress. A civil rights statute conceived as a guarantee has become, in practice, a litigation revenue stream for a small number of plaintiff-side firms.

For the Deaf community specifically, the consequences are concrete. Hospitals routinely fail to provide qualified interpreters and lose ADA cases when sued. Police departments fail to provide qualified interpreters and lose ADA cases when sued. School districts fail to provide qualified interpreters and lose cases when sued. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported earlier in this decade that “communication failures” involving Deaf or hard-of-hearing patients and family members are a leading category of disability discrimination settlements. One Syracuse jury returned a $1.675 million verdict against a distribution company that refused to hire a qualified Deaf warehouse applicant. The law operates only insofar as a Deaf person is willing to litigate, and most Deaf people, like most Americans, are not in a position to litigate.

This is the “sue us” reality David and I encounter in our work together every week. Doctors’ offices tell us they do not provide interpreters; if we want one, we are welcome to sue. Theaters tell us they have no scheduled open-captioned performances; if we want one, we are welcome to sue. Graduate programs tell us they do not maintain Deaf interpreter and Certified Deaf Interpreter teams for advanced seminars; if we want them, we are welcome to sue. The ADA in this pose has been reduced to a dare.

Last month I had to write a separate essay for this blog correcting a Deaf man on TikTok who has built an audience telling hearing beginners that ASL is English. He calls himself an ASL Communication Coach. The bio appears on a TikTok account with no formal training in ASL linguistics behind it. He tags his own videos with #pseteacher in the same posts where he claims that ASL is English, which means he knows the difference between a contact variety and a natural language and is selling the contradiction as engagement bait. Marlee Matlin named the campaign hate. I named the linguistics. Sitting at the kitchen table working on that piece, I kept catching myself thinking about my first semester at NYU in 1991, when teaching ASL was the work of teaching ASL. Defending the existence of the language against a self-identified member of my own community, selling its erasure to a younger audience that cannot yet recognize the trick, was not a job description I would have recognized then.

I reviewed the interpreted matinee of Aladdin at the New Amsterdam Theatre earlier this month, and I came home shaken by the audience. The interpreting was competent. The show worked. Sixty people sat in the Deaf seating block, the youngest of whom looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. I saw no Deaf children. I saw no Deaf teenagers. The hearing children in the orchestra wore Scouts Day princess sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks, and the Deaf families who would once have filled out the side seating block had not come. The production complied with everything the ADA required, and met the audience that thirty-five years of medical, educational, and cultural drift have left to receive it.

The Case

The argument I have been building reduces to a list. 1991 had architecture, law, children, and a community in physical space. The architecture has been merged into a generic nonprofit. The law is treated as optional. Most deaf newborns are implanted before they can speak. Community has dispersed into our private screens. Interpreters are stretched thin and underpaid. The Aladdin matinee tells me the culture itself has thinned to the regulars who fought for it forty years ago, and the JB Mitchell episode tells me even the language is no longer safe inside the community that produced it.

I am not arguing that 1991 was perfect. TTYs were slow. Interpreter shortages were real. Deaf President Now had won a victory at Gallaudet two years earlier without yet completing the larger institutional reckoning at the university or in the larger Deaf service sector. The ADA had structural weaknesses we now see clearly. The community I am describing was full of internal divisions this essay does not attempt to litigate. None of this was perfect.

What I am arguing is that 1991 was a peak we have not approached since. The conditions that made the peak possible, a critical mass of Deaf people in shared physical space, federal recognition of the right to access, a community that included children, technology that required gathering, and leaders who took the law seriously, have all weakened or vanished in the thirty-five years since. The replacement, our current arrangement of private devices, scattered residential patterns, mostly-hearing children of Deaf adults, a federal law that businesses dare us to enforce, and a TikTok layer in which the language itself is up for grabs, falls short of what 1991 already had.

I write this from an apartment in 2026 where the doorbell still flashes, where the smoke detector still strobes, where the videophone has replaced the TTY and works better than anything we had then. I have technology Tanya Nash would have wept to see. What I do not have, what we do not have collectively as a people, is what we had then: the building full of us, the community room on a Friday night, the children in the lobby, the law freshly signed and visibly producing access in places we had never before been allowed to enter, a brand-new marriage and a brand-new job, Joel at his desk, and the sense that the next year would be better than the last. That last sense, the optimism, is what I miss most. I do not believe it is coming back without a deliberate effort that the current generation of Deaf advocates, distracted by individual technologies that make individual lives easier, has not yet made.

There was a year, exact and bounded, when the world we built held together. I am still grateful I lived in it. I want the children who came after us to know it existed.