Most of the 1,300 patients require wheelchairs in this sprawling complex across the East River from Manhattan, the largest long-term care center run by the city's Health and Hospitals Corporation.
"This is called the wheelchair diagnostic repair center, but it's basically a wheelchair pit-stop," the good doctor said in his basement shop on Tuesday where he leads a staff that builds, maintains and repairs a stock of more than 2,000 wheelchairs.
"The wheelchair is their freedom, and my job is to keep them going," said Mr. Acevedo, who is divorced with two grown children. He turns 55 on Wednesday and will be eligible to retire. He has no plans to do so — at least until he cashes in on an invention he's developing on the side: a self-charging wheelchair.
"This is my home — it's all I've ever done," said Mr. Acevedo, who grew up in the Bronx and became fascinated by electronics. He tried studying prosthetics at New York University, he said, "but I realized I was allergic to the plaster of paris used for making the molds."
So, still in his teens, he began working at the Coler-Goldwater shop, which dates to the opening of the hospital in 1939. In the early years, he said, veterans made chairs for amputees coming home from battle.
When Mr. Acevedo first joined the shop, there were still some old wooden wheelchairs around. He trained under a group of Vietnam veterans who developed early motorized wheelchairs by installing motors under the seats of the big bulky Goldwater chairs and equipping them with steering columns, he recalled.
The chairs were belt-driven, had big wheels and were tough to steer. But Mr. Acevedo kept innovating, adding joysticks and electronic controls that he stripped from remote control model airplanes. He found ways to mount ventilators on the chairs, for bronchial patients.
"Now with today's chairs," he said, walking past rows of brand-new motorized wheelchairs ready for calibration, "patients can control them with their foot, their toe, their chin, their breath — even their eyeballs."
Some of his patients roll all over the city.
"One guy, I fixed his chair, and then I see him out in it on Steinway Street buying a hot dog," he said. "We have a woman who rides her chair the length of Queens Boulevard to Jamaica. Another woman takes her chair on the subway to visit her old neighborhood in the Bronx."
For these patients, wheel changes are more frequent, he said, as he walked by bins full of wheels, rails, armrests, control modules, seat cushions, motors and rechargeable batteries. There were lightweight fold-up chairs and heavy-duty ones for heavy patients.
"This can handle a 600-pound person," he said, patting one throne-on-wheels. Then there were the sleek, titanium road-racers, and the chairs used by the Goldwater Swipers basketball team, for which Mr. Acevedo served as team mechanic.
He walked deeper into the cavernous storage areas, surveying hundreds of faded, bulkier units that make the shop something of a wheelchair museum.
"I just love this thing," he said stopping at a cylindrical unit resembling a household boiler. "It's an old iron lung."
He stopped reverentially at a scooter adorned with miniature international flags. The chair, customized by Mr. Acevedo, belonged to a patient who was something of a mayor of the hospital but who died in December. "Some chairs you just can't get rid of — this man was loved by everybody here," said Mr. Acevedo, a dapper dresser who likes his jewelry and keeps an inventory of flashy ties on a rack next to his desk.
"I have to get dirty sometimes, but this isn't a grease monkey operation anymore," he said, demonstrating a computer monitor that plugs into the newer chairs, to diagnose problems. In the shop, his workbench is crowded with tools and meters and oscilloscopes. A soft soundtrack of dance tunes throbbed from his office.
"That's one of my mixes," said Mr. Acevedo, who on weekends works as a D.J. with the nickname DJ Riny-Q, an acronym for Roosevelt Island, New York and Queens — he has lived on the island for decades and been a fixture at Queens dance clubs. He said he had spun records at Studio 54, and even Plato's Retreat ("Clothes on," he emphasized).
Sound systems are his thing. He has rigged them on wheelchairs with the woofer under the seat, and he installed a set of homemade speakers in his office. Then there was Robby, the robot he built years ago to entertain sick children. He used an old wheelchair and added ventilator hoses for arms and a globe for the head. He installed lights and a tape recorder for a voice. It was also a hit at the clubs, out on the dance floor.
"The ladies loved it," he said.
E-mail: character@nytimes.com
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