Working Hard for Harlem’s Future

A Native Son Comes Home

Harlem HPC Director Alwyn Cohall on 125th Street, near the Center’s future community office.

“Living in Harlem is a rollercoaster ride,” says Alwyn Cohall, M.D., the new director of the Harlem Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention. “There is tremendous spirit and community involvement, but also a lot of fear. It makes you mature early.”

He speaks from experience. A native of Jamaica, Cohall’s family moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side when he was two. From the ages of four to fourteen he lived in Harlem, near City College on 150th Street and Convent Avenue. There were times, he remembers, when he walked to school and to the store with a knife in his pocket for protection.

“Childhood should be a carefree time,” he observes. “You shouldn’t have to worry about pulling out a knife to save sixty cents in your pocket.”

Cohall also recalls playing football in the street and twisting an ankle at nine o’clock one summer morning. He went to a local hospital but didn’t receive care until four in the afternoon. On another occasion, a neighbor had an epileptic fit in front of his building. It took twenty minutes for an ambulance to arrive.

“I felt powerless,” Cohall said. “I wanted to try to figure out what to do to prevent that from happening in the future.”

With help from a scholarship, Cohall attended a boarding school where, he says, he was “struck that I had somehow survived when so many of my friends had been jailed or were on drugs. I wanted to use my luck to improve the fortune of others.”

So he did.

At Wesleyan University in Connecticut he majored in anthropology, doing health education and outreach field work on a mobile van on the Lower East Side. He earned his medical degree at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey.

Looking back on his early training, Cohall observes that “in medical school you look at things in microcosm, but anthropology teaches you to look at things more broadly, from a community perspective. You can’t really plan for or understand a community until you understand the issues and problems, what it’s like to live there.”

After completing a pediatrics residency at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx and a fellowship in adolescent medicine at Mt. Sinai Hospital, Cohall moved to St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital Center, where he has been instrumental in helping to develop high school-based health clinics.

Now a CSPH assistant professor in the Center for Population and Family Health (CPFH), a division of the School, and director of the Division of Adolescent Medicine at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt, Cohall has established hospital-based primary care clinics, a comprehensive clinic for teen mothers and their infants, and a clinic for HIV-infected adolescents and young adults. He is also medical director of CPFH’s Young Men’s Clinic, and he runs a busy private practice.

Cohall has written several articles on violence, reproductive health care, and health education, and has co-authored a book on adolescent health issues for consumers. With his wife, Renee Mayer Cohall, a CSPH-affiliated social worker, he has co-produced an award winning health education video on sexually transmitted diseases. He also frequently reviews articles for journals such as American Journal of Public Health, Journal of the American Medical association and the Journal of Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics.

In recognition of his efforts on behalf of young people, Cohall received the 1989 Distinguished Service Award from the American Medical association and, with Young Men’s Clinic founder Bruce Armstrong, D.S.W., the 1995 “Building Brick” Award given by the New York Urban League. He has also been named by New York magazine as one of New York City’s “Outstanding Physicians.”

Of the challenges he faces at the Harlem Health Promotion Center, Cohall observes that “the health care system sometimes approaches problems paternalistically, from the top down, and forgets to include the community. We’re trying to do things in step with the community.”