New York

Overlooked No More: Dolores Alexander, Feminist Journalist and Activist

Published

2 years ago

June 25, 2023

Overlooked No More: Dolores Alexander, Feminist Journalist and Activist

This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.

Dolores Alexander had a few distinct careers throughout her life.

She worked for The New York Times, Newsday and Time magazine. She was executive director of the National Organization for Women, working alongside its president and co-founder, Betty Friedan. And she was a founder of the organization Women Against Pornography.

But she was perhaps best known for opening one of the first feminist restaurants in the United States, Mother Courage, with Jill Ward, her girlfriend at the time. The restaurant, in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, became a hub in the 1970s for women’s liberation groups who would gather in its dining room after feminist protest marches and legislative victories — or even, on an average day, just to have a meal.

“It was important at a time when women, feminists, were being attacked, that we had a place where we could get together,” Lucy Komisar, a freelance journalist, said in an interview. “Guys would go to a pub or a men’s club and hang out, but women didn’t have anything like that. This was a women’s club. It was important because it was our place.”

What linked all of Alexander’s efforts was her devotion to promoting women’s rights and feminism.

“She was a stalwart in the women’s movement from the beginning of the second wave,” Ward said in an interview. “It meant so much to her that she just geared her life toward that, doing as much as she could, whatever it was.”

Dolores DeCarlo was born on Aug. 10, 1931, in Newark, to Dominick and Sally (Koraleski) DeCarlo. Her parents both came from immigrant families, her mother’s from Poland and her father’s from Italy.

Dolores, along with her brother, Richard, her parents and some of her other relatives, lived with her paternal grandparents in a two-story wood frame house in a depressed working-class neighborhood. “It was a very crowded house,” Alexander said in an interview conducted in 2004 and 2005 with the Sophia Smith Oral History Archive at Smith College. “But I remember Sunday mornings because that was when Mary” — her grandmother — “would make the spaghetti. “There was an enamel table, and she’d roll out the dough.”

Both her parents worked at Koppers Coke, a plant in Kearny, N.J., that produced fuel to heat homes. Her mother later worked for a paper cup manufacturing plant.

Dolores attended Roman Catholic schools in New Jersey and continued living at home after high school, working as an office clerk with the Equitable insurance company.

She described her father as “authoritarian” and highly traditional. “He really wanted me to stay at home, have kids and live next door,” she said.

But she had a different plan for herself, and she yearned to go to college. She saved enough money for tuition and enrolled at New York University. There she met Aaron Alexander, who worked in public relations and was studying for his master’s degree to become a teacher. He encouraged Dolores to switch to the City College of New York, which was more affordable. They married in 1950 (her father, upset when he found out that Aaron was Jewish, refused to pay for the wedding) and later moved to an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; they divorced after about five years.

In her senior year, Dolores Alexander became a reporting intern for The New York Times. She asked to join the staff as what was then called a “copy boy,” but, she later recalled, she was told by the city editor that “it would cause a revolution in the newsroom if he hired a girl for the job.” In 1961, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in language and literature and was hired as a reporter at The Newark Evening News. But she found that women writers there weren’t given much support.

“Often the assignments that we got were female-type assignments, to cover parades or, you know, feature-type stuff,” she said.

Three years later, she moved to Newsday, on Long Island, where she was one of three women on staff working as reporters. At first, she said, she was “assigned a lot of stuff like covering local meetings and things like that. It was boring, and I hated it.”

“She asked to be transferred to the Style section, where she got to write profiles, which she loved.

In 1966, Alexander came across a news release announcing the establishment of NOW. She called Friedan, author of the landmark feminist book “The Feminine Mystique,” and joined the small, mostly volunteer team, leaving Newsday in 1969 to become the group’s first executive director.

Tensions between her and Friedan were often high because, by Alexander’s account, Friedan was domineering. One subject about which they disagreed was the visibility of lesbians; feminist organizations were often dismissed based on a stigmatization of lesbianism — “People would say, ‘You’re a dyke. You’re a lesbian. They’re all lesbians,’” Ward said — and Friedan and others tried to distance NOW from that image.

“It was OK with her if women were lesbians,” Alexander said. “She just didn’t want them to talk about it.” Friedan, she said, “felt that this would hurt the women’s movement. And there was some validity to that.”

Alexander was fired from NOW in 1970, as part of what she described as “a lesbian purge” that took place when Friedan felt she was being backed into a corner. “Somehow I became her scapegoat,” she said. “I suddenly became a lesbian who was working with other lesbians in a conspiracy to take over NOW” — although “I was not a lesbian, and there was no such conspiracy.”

Muriel Fox, one of the founders of NOW, and former national chair of the organization, refuted Alexander’s claims.

“She was fired,” she said in an interview, “strictly because the president, Betty Friedan, could not get along with her executive director.”

In her oral history, Alexander said she started “sexually experimenting” in 1968 and fell in love with Ward in 1970. One night that summer, while the couple were living in Bridgehampton, N.Y., Ward was driving home on the Long Island Expressway at 4 a.m. and couldn’t find a place to eat.

“I was really hungry,” Ward said. “I thought, could I go for a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.” When she finally arrived home, she said: “I told Dolores, ‘I have a great idea for a business: Let’s open a feminist restaurant.’”

They rented what Alexander called a “filthy, dirty” ramshackle diner and gut-renovated it. They called it Mother Courage, in honor of the female protagonist of Bertolt Brecht’s play of the same name, and opened the doors in May 1972. The menu was basic, with dishes like Greek salad, veal parmigiana and, as envisioned, spaghetti and meatballs.

The food was not the key to the restaurant’s success, however; it was the women it drew.

Patrons included the authors Audre Lorde and Kate Millett, the cultural critic Jill Johnston, the singer-songwriter Maxine Feldman, the psychotherapist Phyllis Chesler and the author and activist Susan Brownmiller. The NBC News anchor Linda Ellerbee would also stop by, simply to dine after work, knowing it was a safe place where she wouldn’t get hassled, Ward said.

Alexander became the public face of the restaurant. “She treated it as a salon,” Ward said. “I was more nuts and bolts, making sure that the dinner orders were getting out. She would be more like a host, sitting down to schmooze with people.”

But after five years, Alexander started to “ease her way of the restaurant” by taking a job at Time magazine, Ward said, adding that she too “was getting burned out,” and that “we both started thinking, ‘how many years can we do this?’”

Mother Courage closed in 1977, and Alexander and Ward ended their relationship.

In the 1980s, Alexander became one of the founders of, and national coordinators for, the organization Women Against Pornography, working with Brownmiller and Dorchen Leidholdt. She traveled the United States, going to college campuses with Linda Lovelace and Harry Reems, who played the lead roles in the 1972 film “Deep Throat,” and who had heated debates onstage about the impact of pornography on women and society. When Lovelace released “Ordeal” (1980), her memoir about the behind-the-scenes abuse that took place during the making of that film, Alexander provided support, as did Gloria Steinem.

Alexander died on May 13, 2008, in Palm Harbor, Fla., of pulmonary obstruction and congenital heart disease. She was 76. Her papers from her time at NOW are held at the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, and her other correspondence, writings and documents are held at Smith College.

New York

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Published

5 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

Large Blaze Ravages Bronx Apartment Building, Leaving Many Displaced

Dozens of families were looking for shelter after a large fire broke out at an apartment building in the Bronx early Friday, injuring at least seven people, the Fire Department said. There were no fatalities or life-threatening injuries, according to officials.

About 250 firefighters and emergency medical responders rushed to a six-story residential building on Wallace Avenue near Arnow Avenue after a fire was reported there just before 2 a.m., the Fire Department said. The blaze on the top floor was elevated to a five-alarm fire about an hour later, it said.

Several dozen firefighters were still gathered outside the building at around 10 a.m. Many windows on the top floor were blown out and some had shards of glass hanging in place that resembled jagged teeth. Smoke continued to climb from the building as a firefighter on a ladder hosed the roof.

The fire was brought under control shortly before 2 p.m., according to fire officials.

The seven people who were injured included five firefighters, the department said in an email. One person was treated at the scene but declined to be taken to a hospital.

A spokeswoman for the Police Department said earlier that some people had suffered smoke inhalation injuries.

Robert S. Tucker, the fire commissioner, said during a news conference that it was a miracle that there had been no serious injuries or fatalities. Officials said that all of the apartments on the building’s top floor were destroyed.

Firefighters blasted water at the smoke and flames pouring out of the upper floors and roof, according to videos posted online by the Fire Department and television news outlets. Heavy winds had fueled the blaze, the department said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, officials said.

The Red Cross was at the scene helping residents that were displaced by the fire, and a temporary shelter had been set up at the Bennington School on Adee Avenue nearby. Doreen Thomann-Howe, the chief executive of the American Red Cross Greater New York Region, said during the news conference that 66 families had already registered to receive assistance, including lodging. She said she expected that number to increase.

Juan Cabrera and his family were among those seeking help at the Bennington School. Mr. Cabrera said that he and his family had not heard a fire alarm but had instead heard glass breaking as residents climbed out of windows. He said he had also heard people race across the hall one flight above him while others screamed “Get out!”

Mr. Cabrera, 47, said he had smelled smoke and woke up his daughter, Rose, 13. He and his wife, Aurora Tavera, grabbed their IDs, passports and cellphones, and the family left the building.

“I felt desperate,” Ms. Taverna, 32, said.

“Thank God we are still alive,” said Mr. Cabrera, who works as a school aide and custodian and has lived in the building for five years. “The material stuff you can get back, but we have our family,” he said.

Louis Montalvo, 55, was also among those seeking help. He said firefighters banged on his door at around 3 a.m. and that he had smelled smoke.

“I am grateful to be around,” Mr. Montalvo said, as he stood outside of the temporary shelter. He was still wearing his felt pajama pants, which had snowmen printed on them.

Vanessa L. Gibson, the Bronx borough president, said she was “so grateful” there had been no fatalities from the fire.

The last major apartment fire in the Bronx occurred in 2022, and resulted in 17 deaths, which experts said were entirely preventable. Self-closing doors in the building did not work properly, allowing smoke to escape the apartment where the fire started and rapidly fill the structure’s 19 stories.

New York

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

Published

13 hours ago

January 10, 2025

Press Room

New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.

The Chinese government’s paranoia about overseas dissidents can seem strange, considering the enormous differences in power between exiled protesters who organize marches in America and their mighty homeland, a geopolitical and economic superpower whose citizens they have almost no ability to mobilize. But to those familiar with the Chinese Communist Party, the government’s obsession with dissidents, no matter where in the world they are, is unsurprising. “Regardless of how the overseas dissident community is dismissed outside of China, its very existence represents a symbol of hope for many within China,” Wang Dan, a leader of the Tiananmen Square protests who spent years in prison before being exiled to the United States in 1998, told me. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the hope for change among the people is itself a threat. Therefore, they spare no effort in suppressing and discrediting the overseas dissident community — to extinguish this hope in the hearts of people at home.”

To understand the party’s fears about the risks posed by dissidents abroad, it helps to know the history of revolutions in China. “Historically, the groups that have overthrown the incumbent government or regime in China have often spent a lot of time overseas and organized there,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, a professor of China studies at Johns Hopkins University. The leader Sun Yat-sen, who played an important role in the 1911 revolution that dethroned the Qing dynasty and led eventually to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, spent several periods of his life abroad, during which he engaged in effective fund-raising and political coordination. The Communist Party’s own rise to power in 1949 was partly advanced by contributions from leaders who were living overseas. “They are very sensitive to that potential,” Weiss says.

“What the Chinese government and the circle of elites that are running China right now fear the most is not the United States, with all of its military power, but elements of unrest within their own society that could potentially topple the Chinese Communist Party,” says Adam Kozy, a cybersecurity consultant who worked on Chinese cyberespionage cases when he was at the F.B.I. Specifically, Chinese authorities worry about a list of threats — collectively referred to as the “five poisons” — that pose a risk to the stability of Communist rule: the Uyghurs, the Tibetans, followers of the Falun Gong movement, supporters of Taiwanese independence and those who advocate for democracy in China. As a result, the Chinese government invests great effort in combating these threats, which involves collecting intelligence about overseas dissident groups and dampening their influence both within China and on the international stage.

Controlling dissidents, regardless of where they are, is essential to China’s goal of projecting power to its own citizens and to the world, according to Charles Kable, who served as an assistant director in the F.B.I.’s national security branch before retiring from the bureau at the end of 2022. “If you have a dissident out there who is looking back at China and pointing out problems that make the entire Chinese political apparatus look bad, it will not stand,” Kable says.

The leadership’s worries about such individuals were evident to the F.B.I. right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kable told me, describing how the Chinese worked to ensure that the running of the Olympic flame through San Francisco would not be disrupted by protesters. “And so, you had the M.S.S. and its collaborators deployed in San Francisco just to make sure that the five poisons didn’t get in there and disrupt the optic of what was to be the best Olympics in history,” Kable says. During the run, whose route was changed at the last minute to avoid protesters, Chinese authorities “had their proxies in the community line the streets and also stand back from the streets, looking around to see who might be looking to cause trouble.”

New York

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Published

22 hours ago

January 9, 2025

Press Room

Hochul Seeks to Limit Private-Equity Ownership of Homes in New York

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York on Thursday proposed several measures that would restrict hedge funds and private-equity firms from buying up large numbers of single-family homes, the latest in a string of populist proposals she intends to include in her State of the State address next week.

The governor wants to prevent institutional investors from bidding on properties in the first 75 days that they are on the market. Her plan would also remove certain tax benefits, such as interest deductions, when the homes are purchased.

The proposals reflect a nationwide effort by mostly Democratic lawmakers to discourage large firms from crowding out individuals or families from the housing market by paying far above market rate and in cash, and then leasing the homes or turning them into short-term rentals.

Activists and some politicians have argued that this trend has played a role in soaring prices and low vacancy rates — though low housing production is widely viewed as the main driver of those problems.

If Ms. Hochul was inviting a fight with the real estate interests who have backed her in the past, she did not seem concerned. She even borrowed a line from Jimmy McMillan, who ran long-shot candidacies for governor and mayor as the founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party.

“The cost of living is just too damn high — especially when it comes to the sky-high rents and mortgages New Yorkers pay every month,” Ms. Hochul said in a written statement.

James Whelan, president of the Real Estate Board of New York, said his team would review the proposal, but characterized it as “another example of policy that will stifle investment in housing in New York.”

The plan — the specifics of which will be negotiated with the Legislature — is one of several recent proposals the governor has made with the goal of addressing the state’s affordability crisis. Voters have expressed frustration about the high costs of housing and basic goods in the state. This discontent has led to political challenges for Ms. Hochul, who is likely to face rivals in the 2026 Democratic primary and in the general election.

In 2022, five of the largest investors in the United States owned 2 percent of the country’s single-family rental homes, most of them in Sun Belt and Southern states, according to a recent report from the federal Government Accountability Office. The report stated that it was “unclear how these investors affected homeownership opportunities or tenants because many related factors affect homeownership — e.g., market conditions, demographic factors and lending conditions.”

Researchers at Harvard University found that “a growing share of rental properties are owned by business entities and medium- and large-scale rental operators.”

State officials were not able to offer a complete picture of how widespread the practice was in New York. They said local officials in several upstate cities had told them about investors buying up dozens of homes at a time and turning them into rentals.

The New York Times reported in 2023 that investment firms were buying smaller buildings in places like Brooklyn and Queens from families and smaller landlords.

Ms. Hochul’s concern is that these purchases make it harder for first-time home buyers to gain a foothold in the market and can lead to more rental price gouging.

“Shadowy private-equity giants are buying up the housing supply in communities across New York, leaving everyday homeowners with nowhere to turn,” she said in a statement on Thursday. “I’m proposing new laws and policy changes to put the American dream of owning a home within reach for more New Yorkers than ever before.”

Cracking down on corporate landlords became a prominent talking point in last year’s presidential election. On the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris called on Congress to pass previously introduced legislation eliminating tax benefits for large investors that purchase large numbers of homes.

“It can make it impossible then for regular people to be able to buy or even rent a home,” Ms. Harris said last summer.

In August, Representative Pat Ryan, Democrat of New York, called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate price gouging by private-equity firms in the housing market. He cited a study that estimated that private-equity firms “are expected to control 40 percent of the U.S. single-family rental market by 2030.”

Statehouses across the country have recently looked at ways to tackle corporate homeownership. One effort in Nevada, which passed the Legislature but was vetoed by Gov. Joe Lombardo, proposed capping the number of units a corporation could buy in a calendar year. It was opposed by local chambers of commerce and the state’s homebuilders association.

A bill was introduced in the Minnesota State Legislature that would ban the conversion of homes owned by corporations into rentals. It has yet to come up for a vote.

At the federal level, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, and Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington, introduced joint legislation that would force hedge funds to sell all the single-family homes they own over 10 years.