A great article on the "Upper Breast Side" breastfeeding store in
Manhattan.
Naomi
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/nyregion/11breast.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_HP_LO_MST_FB
Breast-Feeding Boutique in Feud With Condo Board
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Published: March 10, 2011
For legions of lactating women in one of Manhattan’s most productive
precincts, it has become an essential destination: a place to buy
breast pumps and BPA-free bottles, and to bond over the myriad
challenges of what is supposed to be the most natural thing in the
world. The windowless emporium on West 70th Street has not just
nursing bras but nursing blouses, nursing tank tops and nursing
dresses, with a name, though high in snicker potential, that perfectly
captures the neighborhood zeitgeist: The Upper Breast Side.
But now, the boutique is colliding with another symbol of Manhattan
life: the powerful board and picayune rules of a fancy apartment
building, in this case the Pythian, a legendary landmark originally
built as an exclusive — and, yes, all-male — lodge.
After a member of the board of the Pythian, a condominium whose ground-
floor space the Upper Breast Side occupies, complained that its brass
door was improperly ajar — and fined it $250 — the owner, Felina
Rakowski-Gallagher, filed a discrimination complaint with the New York
State Division of Human Rights. The door, she said, was too heavy for
pregnant women and stroller-pushing mothers to open safely.
The state found “sufficient evidence” to support the complaint, and
recommended a public hearing; a settlement conference is scheduled for
March 23. Meanwhile, the board of the Pythian has escalated the
argument, saying that the Upper Breast Side is not a consultancy or
resource center, as Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher described it when she
bought the space five years ago — but a retail store.
“Your use of the unit is not permitted under the building’s
certificate of occupancy, which authorizes only ‘doctors offices’ on
the first floor,” reads a letter from the board’s president, Laura
Hartstein. “The building is located within the R8B zoning district, a
residential district, in which commercial/retail uses are not
permitted.”
Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher, 47, a former police officer who turned in her
badge to start the business from her apartment 11 years ago, maintains
that the Upper Breast Side is no mere store but a “community
facility,” which residential zoning allows. “They’re just blinded to
what we do here for the nursing community,” she said in an interview.
And thus another front has opened in the breast-feeding wars, in which
some stores and institutions have asked women to refrain from nursing
publicly — only to suffer a backlash from a powerful consumer
demographic — and in which some women have wondered whether the social
pressure to breast-feed has become excessive.
Breast-feeding is, in general, enjoying a renaissance. The Bloomberg
administration has been promoting the practice among new mothers in
public hospitals and by advising companies on how to create lactation
programs for their nursing employees. Last month,Michelle Obama told
reporters at a roundtable that she would promote nursing as part of
her campaign to reduce childhood obesity, and the Internal Revenue
Service decided that it would grant mothers a tax break on pumps and
other supplies.
But breast-feeding boosters say it often falls to people like Ms.
Rakowski-Gallagher to help women navigate a practice that can be
painful and confounding. In addition to selling gear, the Upper Breast
Side refers customers to lactation consultants and doctors; hosts a
weekly “latch-on clinic” for women struggling to get their babies to,
well, latch on; and matches up customers with properly fitting bras.
At a counter referred to as the “milk bar,” bleary-eyed new mothers
and their partners learn how to work a pump (the session is free if
they buy one, $50 if not).
“When mothers leave the hospital, are we going to throw them to the
wolves, or are we going to provide support?” asked Marsha Walker, the
executive director of the National Alliance for Breastfeeding
Advocacy. “If it’s zoned for community service, well, that’s exactly
what’s being provided.”
Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher was a five-year veteran of the New York Police
Department when Samantha, the first of her two children, was born in
1998. Stunned to discover that New York lacked a single go-to place
for women in need of everything from advice on avoiding mastitis to
nipple shields (what’s that, you ask? exactly!), she opened a breast-
feeding clearinghouse from her dining room table. As the business
grew, she moved to a cramped space on West 71st Street and then, in
2007, to Unit 1L in the Pythian, which she had bought for $825,000 and
spent more than a year renovating.
This was not her first run-in with the condo board: She said there
have been complaints over her daughter’s drawing on the sidewalk
outside with chalk, for example, and about her placement of a plant in
front of the store.
Ms. Hartstein, the board president, declined to discuss the situation,
and other members of the board did not return telephone messages.
Howard Broxmeyer, who works for the company that manages the building,
also declined an interview, saying only: “That’s between the board and
them.”
In documents, the State Division of Human Rights summarized the condo
board’s position as citing a “long-standing rule that doors should
remain closed, except when in actual use.” A state investigator
witnessed “several clients struggle to open the exterior door,” the
records say, and found that the former occupant, a chiropractor, had
also kept the door open. Officials do not address Ms. Hartstein’s
accusation that Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher was “illegally operating a
retail commercial business out of her unit.”
According to city rules, a “community facility” is defined as
promoting “educational, recreational, religious, health or other
essential services for the community it serves.” Councilwoman Gale A.
Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side, said that she was
sympathetic to the boutique’s operation but that the zoning issue was
tricky. “It’s a fine line,” she said. “This is a very unusual business
model.”
Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher, who had to stop nursing her son when he was a
baby to be treated for breast cancer (he is now 7), is known for her
tell-it-like-it-is manner. When customers inquire whether she carries
certain popular nursing covers, she has been known to snap, “Have you
ever tried eating while covering yourself with a shower curtain?”
Further evidence the place is more community than commercial, Ms.
Rakowski-Gallagher maintains: Would Buy Buy Baby refuse to carry a hot
product on principle? “I never wanted to be known as the woman who
sells the most fashionable nursing clothing,” she said, adding that
she aspired to be “the woman who put easier breast-feeding on the map
of New York City, and made it something as ordinary as eating pie and
talking on your cellphone.”
In an age when dermatologists’ offices routinely sell expensive face
creams, the line between a retail and medical enterprise can be
blurry. Why, one might wonder, does a “community facility” have to
sell a $145 silky black nursing bra or a rhinestone-encrusted number
by a company called HOTmilk?
“Are you going to nurse in something that looks like a stretched-out
athletic sock, or do you want to wear a completely blinged-out HOTmilk
or Marlies Dekkers nursing bra that looks just like what Lady Gaga
wears?” Ms. Rakowski-Gallagher said. “Nursing is normal. And normal
means that you can be really gorgeous.”
------------------------------------------
Naomi Bar-Yam Ph.D.
Executive Director
Mothers' Milk Bank of New England
[log in to unmask]
617-527-6263
www.milkbankne.org
------------------------------------------
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