The Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns promised privacy and Chanel gift bags. Patients and doulas report fleas, filth, and neglect.
In the beginning, long before the beautiful birthing rooms, were the Chanel gift bags. In 2004, the company began donating full-size beauty and fragrance products to all women who gave birth at the NewYork–Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center on the Upper East Side — it started after the daughter of Chanel’s then-president planned to deliver there.
In the summer of 2020, the tradition, which had gained little notice, moved across the street to the center’s new dedicated maternity unit, the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns at 68th and York. The new hospital, occupying six floors of NewYork–Presbyterian’s David H. Koch Center, was created in part with a $75 million gift from hedge-fund billionaire and Mets owner Steve Cohen and his wife Alexandra. From its launch, the facility promised vanguard technologies — including an operating room in the neonatal intensive-care unit — and advertised a sleek and luxurious design. Curved wooden screens evoking waves were installed across the lobby’s high ceilings. Patient rooms were hung with light-ash paneling and artwork by women, curated by the gallery Salon 94. Elegant en suite bathrooms had immense marbled vanities, some with capacious bathtubs. Patients’ guests could rest on extra-long sleeper sofas in caramel hues. A private family dining room with a long stone-top table and, in the words of the hospital’s architects, “dramatic sculptural” lighting, provided, as they put it, “a space to capture an Instagram moment with the new baby.” One of the designers described the effect toin 2021, saying, “It’s that timeless feel but also minimal and clean; it has a New York City quality.” In fact, Alexandra Cohen’s greatest selling point was extraordinary for the city: Patients would have private rooms for nearly every part of their birth experience—intake assessments, delivery, anesthesia recovery, and their early postpartum days. Even the babies in neonatal intensive care could have their own rooms, allowing families secluded visits, 24/7. While the city’s public hospitals, including Metropolitan, a mile and a half north, offered some private postpartum spaces, New Yorkers who preferred the most prestigious institutions had long needed to choose between paying thousands of dollars for solitude and sharing accommodations with another family — at least two newborns and up to four adults squeezed into a space equivalent to a walk-in closet. Often, private rooms weren’t even available. What Alexandra Cohen promised was something of a miracle, and in 2024, the buzz around the place became a frenzy. That spring, Chloe Tucker Caine, a Realtor who’d appeared on Netflix’sgave birth there and posted a TikTok video showing off her Chanel haul: a bottle of Coco Mademoiselle perfume, a lipstick, and a water-to-foam cleanser. The post got nearly half a million likes and a write-up inmagazine. “I love that your hospital gave you Chanel,” read one comment, liked 26,000 times. “Mine gave me birthing trauma so like samesies.” On Reddit and in Facebook groups including Moms of the Upper East Side, would-be patients traded tips for getting in; some suggested calling a participating OB “as soon as the pee is dry” on the pregnancy test and debated the merits of just showing up at Alexandra Cohen in labor, when the hospital would be legally required to treat them. By 2023, just three years after opening, more babies were being born at the hospital than any other in the five boroughs. As it has continued to vacuum up market share — especially from its Manhattan neighbors Mount Sinai Hospital and Lenox Hill — a type of amenities arms race has begun. Institutions across the city are creating private postpartum rooms, adding family lounges, and offering patients more simple extras, such as sleep kits with eye masks and earplugs. But Alexandra Cohen is known as the elite pick. When I began speaking to patients and providers this winter, I heard of one woman who mistakenly believed she was going to get a real Chanel handbag. A Brooklynite told me that when she’d chosen a different hospital — Mount Sinai West — because it had a reputation for supporting unmedicated delivery, her friends made her feel “almost shitty for having given birth at a not-as-nice hospital.” “It’s just become a status symbol,” she said. In the spring of 2022, when I was pregnant for the second time, I’d walked into the granite-floor lobby of the building housing Alexandra Cohen. Half by chance, half strategically, I’d scored an OB who delivered at Alexandra Cohen , and I was optimistic. There would be no roommates to blast Lady Gaga at 2 a.m., as mine had after my first birth. At a white, marbled desk, I checked in for an ultrasound. Light poured in through four rows of windows, stacked floor to ceiling. “This is really nice!” I said to the receptionist. He shrugged and replied, “Everything here is falling apart.” It had, in fact, been very nice when Lindsay had her first baby at Alexandra Cohen a couple years ago, though the birth had been, in her words, traumatic. The nurses were attentive and the staff friendly, and she returned last year for the birth of her second child — a scheduled Cesarean, which went well. But things began to seem different after the surgery. First, she says, she was made to wait an exhausting five hours in the recovery room before being moved to a postpartum room. When a postpartum room was finally available, Lindsay says, she noticed holes in the bedsheets, and the chair her husband was using creaked loudly. Then, at 3 a.m. that first night, she awoke to the sensation of itching on the skin around her ankles; it felt like mosquito bites, but she’d been wearing freshly laundered compression socks she’d brought from home. The following day, a handful of red bumps appeared. At home two days later, the itching continued; the bites seemed to be multiplying. After a Cesarean, patients are advised not to bend at the waist or exert themselves, but Lindsay couldn’t help but reach down to scratch. The bumps turned to throbbing blisters, and soon her feet were too swollen to put on shoes. She could barely walk. Within a few days of returning home, she saw a bug jumping on her bed. She managed to capture a second one in her sheets and check it against pictures online: They looked like fleas. To Lindsay, it seemed obvious the bugs had come from the hospital. “All I know,” she says, “is I left my home with not one bite and came back from NYP with several that grew to dozens.” She and her husband had no pets, and fleas couldn’t reproduce in synthetics like her socks. She began obsessively vacuuming and scrubbing her apartment, medical advice be damned. Eventually, the whole family — parents, toddler, newborn — would have to vacate the apartment so it could be treated by an exterminator. It took two rounds. In the meantime, Lindsay’s doctor confirmed another suspicion: Her surgical incision had become infected, apparently under the strain of all the movement. She needed two courses of antibiotics. When she complained to the hospital, a patient-services representative said Alexandra Cohen was “unable to identify any potential source for the infestation,” though it offered to reimburse her for the home extermination as a “courtesy.” In the past year, stories like Lindsay’s — of cleanliness and maintenance problems at Alexandra Cohen — have been spreading through word of mouth and on message boards. Some allegations have been more serious, including rushed and neglectful care leading to significant medical issues. Last November, one anonymous poster pleaded for a reporter to look into the hospital, claiming, “This is a very compelling case of overcrowding, poor management, and dismissive/negative treatment.” Dee, a 34-year-old who works in tech and lives on the Upper East Side, says without hesitation that she chose Alexandra Cohen several years ago because of the Chanel gift bag: “That’s why I gave birth there. Zero shame.” But the delivery was nothing like what she’d imagined. She says her epidural failed — that she could feel all her contractions, told the staff, and was moaning in pain — but her complaints were dismissed. “It took many hours and multiple providers,” she says, “to realize the shot needed to be put in again.” Dee doesn’t know if she’ll have another child. But she is certain she’s never going back to Alexandra Cohen. I’ve been reporting on reproductive care and hospitals in New York City long enough to have heard at least one harrowing story about every institution, public and private: accounts of long waits, crumbling facilities, and rude staff; of patients being ignored, pressured, and bullied. I also personally know women who have had fine and even very good experiences at Alexandra Cohen. Initially, it seemed possible that the hospital was no worse than its peers — that its shortcomings were simply more stark because of the promises it made. But ten doulas, who collectively have attended thousands of births across New York City and hundreds at Alexandra Cohen, claimed emphatically that the center’s failings were distinct. One with decades of experience told me, “Alexandra Cohen is probably the hospital that we talk the most about, because it is the most popular and the place that we counsel against the most. It doesn’t feel like as much of a mill anywhere else.” Several of the doulas I spoke with said they’ve advised clients to avoid the center if they want low-intervention births; two told me they try not to work there at all. Though they had not yet heard complaints of fleas, none were surprised by stories of unclean facilities. One said she’d even seen dirty floors after patients had been made to wait seven hours for a room; on another occasion, she saw amniotic fluid streaked across the floor. A second doula described rooms that had supposedly been cleaned but had used labor gowns crumpled under the beds. A third had seen unidentifiable brown spots on the floors, and a fourth had seen blood. The last told me she believes the rooms at Alexandra Cohen are dirtier than elsewhere in the city. She cleans everything with alcohol wipes when she arrives and says she always tells her clients not to put their stuff on the floor. The doulas were also unanimous in their belief that many of the design elements touted by Alexandra Cohen are distinctly unsuited for the realities of labor and birth. They were particularly incensed by the hospital’s choice, in its early months, to use petite garbage cans, tucked in low cabinets, in its delivery rooms. Births produce copious amounts of hazardous trash, soiled in blood and other bodily fluids, and at Alexandra Cohen, in the words of one doula, “You had to use your hand to open the cabinet to get to the garbage can, which is insane” — especially so in 2020, near the peak of COVID hypervigilance. “Huge trash piles,” she said, had accumulated on the floors. While larger, less attractive bins with foot pedals have since been wheeled in, other problems remain. The nurses’ station is walled off with frosted glass, which doulas believe makes the staff less accessible and responsive. The doulas were also frustrated with Alexandra Cohen’s supposedly lavish bathrooms. One doula said the showers aren’t pitched properly and often fail to drain; she recalled building a dam of towels to prevent the bathroom filling with water. Though the hospital’s initial press release described the bathtubs as being for “labor pain management,” none of the doulas I spoke with had ever seen a tub in use. Two said medical providers had told them Alexandra Cohen doesn’t have the resources to monitor patients in the tubs. “If you don’t have enough staff to give people enough attention,” one doula said, “then you have to keep them safe by doing things like putting them in beds on monitors.” It’s not uncommon for hospitals to prefer that labor-and-delivery patients stay in bed, but the doulas were infuriated by the distance between what Alexandra Cohen advertised and what was really on offer. The hospital’s designers told journalists they chose to install acoustic panels in geometric shapes along the hospital’s corridors because women in focus groups reported they were often bored when walking the halls of maternity wards . But doulas say they rarely saw patients in the halls, and one who works at Alexandra Cohen often was under the impression that the center actually restricts patients to their rooms. From the start, Alexandra Cohen has aimed to serve a high volume of patients. At its launch, the hospital advertised that it would have an annual capacity of more than 7,000 births, and according to the most recently available public data, from 2023, few institutions in the city come close to delivering as many babies. Last year, it delivered 8,900. Most complaints suggest that this is too high — that the hospital is reaching beyond what it is capable of providing. Doulas told me that crowded conditions at Alexandra Cohen seem to drive important decisions, pushing providers to speed labor in order to free up rooms. Physician assistants and nurses, they claim, also step in for doctors more often than at other hospitals. “I understand that a labor-and-delivery environment is unpredictable,” a longtime doula told me. “I work in all the New York City hospitals. They all have days where it’s crazytown.” But when chaos “is the norm,” she said, “then that is a staffing problem. That is aproblem.” She’s worked alongside some of Alexandra Cohen’s doctors for decades — since long before the center opened — and, she said, “I have watched them become increasingly burnt out and stressed.” This of course has consequences for patients: “The care has changed because of the pace.” That effect is backed up by research, which shows that giving birth when a hospital is busy can lead to more medical interventions — not only Cesareans but also deliveries with vacuums or forceps, and episiotomies, which each carry their own risks. Scheduling inductions can help a hospital manage the flow of patients, but several doulas told me that at Alexandra Cohen, these appointments are rescheduled and delayed frequently, far more commonly than at other hospitals, creating serious logistical problems for patients and adding emotional strain. “It doesn’t sound like a huge thing,” one doula said, “but when you consider what it is like for a person who is anticipating an induction and the fear and stress and lack of sleep and worry and all of that, and then the waiting by the phone, and,,” it can be enormously disruptive. Another doula said, “I’ve seen endless families sitting in the waiting room at Alexandra Cohen waiting for an induction. I’ve shown up to a birth, been there for 12-plus hours, left, and the family is still sitting in the waiting room.” Patients giving birth are in many ways at the mercy of their doctors and hospitals. Providers decide not only how long they can be kept waiting but also how long they’re allowed to labor before a C-section is deemed necessary. Among doulas, Alexandra Cohen has a reputation for holding to a particularly strict timeline: “There’s always this very intense clock there,” one said. “I’ve heard it so many times from different doctors:” At the same time, doulas say, the hospital often doesn’t give patients the care they might need in order to progress fast enough. One recalled a woman given Pitocin, the synthetic oxytocin used to induce and speed up contractions, who was left alone for hours at a time without her dose being upped — the standard process to keep labor moving. The patient worried she would wind up in surgery. “I kept asking the nurse,” the doula said, “‘Why aren’t you going up on the Pitocin? Is there something wrong with the baby?’” As she remembers it, the nurse told her she didn’t feel safe increasing the drug even though the doctor had ordered it — she was covering too many rooms. While I was not able to assess how many patients nurses at the hospital generally manage, the gold standard during inductions is one nurse to one laboring patient. Several doulas said room and staff shortages at the hospital also lead to excessive delays in care: The staff seems reluctant to admit patients until their water breaks or they’re in advanced labor. Women who want epidurals are admitted earlier but still frequently wait as long as eight hours for rooms — many hours longer, the doulas say, than at other hospitals. When Harper arrived at Alexandra Cohen in January 2024, she wanted an epidural. She’d chosen the hospital partly because of the guaranteed private room; she and her husband had been brought to tears by the online video tour., she recalls thinking. They would get to recover together. She would feel cared for. Harper knew she might present a challenge to doctors because of two deep curves in her spine — she has scoliosis — and she met with a Weill Cornell anesthesiologist to determine the best path. This would make the epidural complicated, he said, and he recommended she come in as early in her labor as possible and ask for the most experienced anesthesiologist on call. When her contractions began three months later, she did just that, taking a car from Brooklyn in rush-hour traffic. In triage, Harper says, she was told she was only one or two centimeters dilated out of a possible ten and that she should go home and come back when she was in a lot more pain. How much pain, she asked? She was already experiencing quite a bit. “They said,” she recalls, “‘Come back when you’re in so much pain that you can’t talk and you can’t breathe.’” Reluctantly, she went home. When she returned six hours later, Harper says, she told staff members what the anesthesiologist had advised, asking for the most experienced person available. According to her, a nurse replied sarcastically, “Oh, no, we’re going to find the least experienced person who doesn’t know how to do it.” Around that same time, Harper says, other staff started reprimanding her for not coming in earlier. Her cervix was now ten centimeters dilated: It was time to push. Her baby was born about an hour after she finally got her epidural. In her postpartum room, as she recalls it, the attending nurse was taken aback to see that her back was caked in dried feces — possibly her own and the baby’s. The nurse didn’t say much, Harper says. “I think she was pretty horrified that I hadn’t been cleaned at all.” Only about 6 percent of New York births are attended by doulas, and one told me she wondered how patients at Alexandra Cohen were treated when they weren’t accompanied by experienced advocates. “I’m just heartbroken, in a way,” another said. “I feel like the hospital was something that really started off as a great thing. And like so many things that become popular, it morphed and has been ruined.” Pregnancy and birth are unwieldy businesses, and hospitals generally lose money on both. But delivering babies is a sort of marketing doorbuster. “Hospitals see improving their maternity facilities or their offerings as a part of a larger strategy for market share,” said Amber Weiseth of Ariadne Labs, a research center at Harvard’s School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “They see that women are decision-makers for the longevity of health care.” Weiseth is the director of Ariadne’s Delivery Decisions Initiative, which works with hundreds of hospitals to try to improve maternal health care. Many, she says, are under pressure from executives to bring up their birth numbers. Staff at Alexandra Cohen may have been facing similar demands, but no doctors who deliver there would speak to me for this story. In February, I was scheduled to interview Dr. Laura Riley, the head of obstetrics and gynecology at the hospital and a respected specialist in high-risk pregnancy, but the conversation was canceled a few hours before it was set to take place and never rescheduled. In response to a list of detailed questions about patient complaints and how Alexandra Cohen manages its popularity while keeping patients safe, the hospital offered a written statement but few answers of substance. “Our team’s focus,” it read in part, “is on the safest care for mothers and their babies, and we are carefully managing patient census to maintain exceptional patient experiences.” When I was 28 weeks pregnant with my second child, my doula told me, as gently as she could muster, that based on what I’d shared about my priorities for the birth, I might want to switch providers — and away from Alexandra Cohen. She suggested I look at Oula, a midwifery and OB/GYN practice that, with the help of venture capital, had a gorgeous clinic in Brooklyn Heights , and whose patients delivered at Mount Sinai West. I worried about sharing a room again, but Mount Sinai was in the process of renovating, and a dad at the park where I took our child to play told me his wife had just gotten a sparkling new private accommodation. I switched. The wallpaper in my room was dated, and while I was in labor, the rickety bed broke, but I had excellent care. After my delivery, by the luck of the draw, I got a private room with natural light and a city view; it was free. Once a day, a staff member came around with freshly made smoothies. It all felt like something everyone should have. The reality about Alexandra Cohen, one doula with nearly 20 years of experience argued, is that “they built this beautiful new building to make money. They didn’t build it to make sure everybody had a beautiful birth experience.” That, of course, wasn’t unusual; ultimately, money was the reason Mount Sinai had given out smoothies. But Alexandra Cohen had been “unique,” she said: “People thought it was going to be different.” Having space, privacy, and relative quiet to recover from giving birth matters to patient outcomes, Weiseth told me, but it’s only a small part of the story. Research shows that patients report good birth experiences when they feel listened to and when they believe doctors and staff have made decisions in their best interests. “It’s not about the Chanel bags,” she said. It’s harder for patients to feel cared for and to trust providers when a labor-and-delivery floor is overcrowded, she went on, but it’s not impossible. Roughly 300 American hospitals are working with Ariadne Labs to implement the organization’s “Team Birth” model for improving pregnancy outcomes and patient satisfaction — especially by including them in decision-making. The Mount Sinai health-care system, whose flagship on the Upper East Side appears to have lost the greatest share of patients to Alexandra Cohen, is a participant. “We would like to have a larger delivery volume,” Peter Bernstein, Mount Sinai’s system director for obstetrics, tells me, “but the way we want to earn that is by having patients come to us because they want the experience that we offer. We’re not going to be able to build a facility like the Alexandra Cohen Hospital, but they’ll care less about how good the paint job is if they feel like they were well cared for.” The woman who told me she’d chosen Alexandra Cohen for the Chanel gift bag, whose allegedly misplaced epidural resulted in hours of pain, ended up having an unplanned Cesarean. Her husband, she said, was too traumatized to talk about their experience — he’d been afraid he was going to lose her. But she did get her bag — perfume, lipstick, and makeup remover. “I remember thinking,Your Weekly Horoscopes by Madame Clairevoyant: March 29–April 4Your Weekly Horoscopes by Madame Clairevoyant: March 29–April 4Your Daily Horoscope by Madame Clairevoyant: March 30, 2026Jealousy may flare as Venus enters Taurus, while the full moon in Libra reveals what’s out of balance in your life.In this week’s story, a bisexual newsletter editor for a PR firm goes on dates and flirts on apps.At the iHeartRadio Awards, the pair marked their awards-show debut as a couple with plenty of kissing and celebrity photo ops.Including under-$50 Levi’s for women and men, our best overall and best less-expensive bed pillows, and lots of our longtime favorite beauty products.A new report says the Defense secretary overstepped his role to prevent two women and two Black men from being promoted to one-star general.New York
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