NEW YORK — Fifteen years ago, Alex Cohen knew something was wrong. Always smiling and upbeat, she was used to being on her feet all day, hardly ever slowing down or pacing herself. Now, her foot constantly hurt, she experienced memory loss and fatigue, and other neurological issues. At times, Cohen couldn’t get out of bed or remember where she lived. Simple tasks such as driving by herself became terrifying.
Alex’s husband, hedge-fund billionaire Steve Cohen, a confident money manager and usually unflappable, grew more worried about his wife as her condition became more stressful. Doctor after doctor, expert after expert, was unable to pinpoint a root cause. Multiple times, she was misdiagnosed. Motherhood made no room for her limitations. No matter how much Cohen, then 43, was ailing, she still had young kids, including a five-year-old daughter, to take care of while tending to her own health problems. Her kids still needed to go to school early in the morning, and when they came home, somebody needed to be there to help with their homework.
After two years, and a lot of dollars spent, Cohen was eventually diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2009. Cohen tried lots of different supplements and antibiotics, but it wasn’t until she flew to Germany five years ago, for hyperthermia treatment that was not yet approved in the United States, that Cohen’s brain began functioning normally again. She underwent two weeks of intensive treatment at Klinik St. Georg, and recovered after three months, finally Lyme-free.
“That really stopped me in my tracks and I said, number one, my life is so important,” Cohen said in an interview with the New York Daily News. “My health is so important. So I had to give up being the busy woman that I was.”
Receiving the diagnosis and reclaiming her life were solid first steps, but they weren’t enough for Cohen, who has two decades of philanthropy work behind her at the Steve and Alex Foundation, which was founded the day after 9/11.
“I believe that I got Lyme because I was going to be the one to change things,” Cohen said.
To date, she has given $73.7 million toward Lyme disease research, treatment and development efforts, including $16 million to Columbia University for the Cohen Center for Health and Recovery from Tickborne Diseases. In New York, the Cohen Center was the first of its kind.
Today, a year and a half after the Cohens purchased the Mets, Alex remains something of an unknown to most Mets fans. She is not involved with baseball operations, but has carried a lifetime of professional experience, and a not-small amount of personal experience, into a role as president of the Amazin’ Mets Foundation, where she is focused on expanding the organization’s efforts to aid underserved groups throughout Queens.
It’s a role perfectly suited to Cohen’s life and upbringing, which was made up of equal parts Tom Seaver and Tom Aquinas.
A movement of the soul toward charity and Flushing
Cohen was born in Harlem and grew up in Washington Heights, or as she calls it, Bronx West. Her mother, Rosa, was very religious, attending mass every day, and her father, Ralph, worked in the post office. “So we were a typical Latino family,” Cohen said. “The mom stayed home and the dad went to work.” Alex attended the same Catholic school where her mother worked, the nearby St. Elizabeth’s.
When Cohen wasn’t at school, helping her community or spending summers in Puerto Rico, she was watching Mets games every night with her dad, 90-year-old Ralph Garcia, now better known as Mets Grandpa. There was one TV in her Washington Heights childhood home, and everyone in the family knew not to touch the remote.
“It was always the Mets that were playing, that’s all we watched,” Cohen said. “My father would have a bad day if the Mets lost. The whole day was ruined — for everybody — because he was annoyed. He’d gnaw off the edge of his mustache all the time. So he always had half a mustache because the Mets were always giving him a hard time.”
While the Mets fandom may have come from Ralph, it was Alex’s mother, Rosa, who instilled in her the ethic of charity. When Rosa wasn’t at church or handling the brunt of her domestic responsibilities, she would spend her time rummaging through a thrift shop. Cohen would go to a rummage sale store after school, to work. For about two hours after school, Cohen would set up at a table, and do her homework there, but she would also help dress and wash the dolls in the store, all of which would be re-sold for the church.
Cohen’s love for humanitarianism began, at least in part, in that rummage sale store. But the act of giving and generosity in general was always present in her Washington Heights community. Cohen grew up in a neighborhood that was very close. If someone had a new baby and they didn’t have any money, Cohen’s family would organize the baby shower and make sure the neighbors pooled together to buy something.
“Even if it cost a dollar,” Cohen said. “We would show them that we were a part of the family. Growing up, whatever money we made, I helped my parents or if someone in the building needed it, I helped them. We grew up in such a connected community, which you don’t see as much anymore. If you don’t really know your neighbors, you wouldn’t know if someone needs help. We didn’t have that kind of life. We grew up helping anybody who needed it.”
Around 20 years ago, Cohen started giving away tickets and upgrading seats for fans sitting in the upper level at Shea Stadium. Now, as Mets owner, Cohen still keeps up this tradition by strolling through Citi Field’s cheap seats, occasionally shooting the breeze with Mets faithful and listening to their stories about how they became fans, before upgrading them to the best seats in the house — field level and right behind home plate. It brings her joy to give to people, but mostly, Cohen said: “It’s just who I am and I couldn’t change it if I tried.”
“She’s so normal and she’s not affected by the wealth,” said Jeanne Melino, now on the Mets’ board of directors and one of Cohen’s best friends of 20 years. “Very down to earth.”
Mets lifer and meeting Steve
Another thing Cohen can’t change? She can only ever be seen wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She has over 300 T-shirts in her closet, so many of them Mets-related, and she tries to wear every shirt that people, including fans, will buy and send to her. “I tell people that are having a dinner party, ‘If I can’t wear jeans, I’m not coming,’ ” she said.
Cohen said their ownership of the Mets is unique in part because they have an open-door policy and because they emphasize the importance of family. Before Max Scherzer signed with the Mets last December, Scherzer’s wife, Erica, said she had to talk to Alex first. Cohen said Scherzer wouldn’t sign with the Mets until they made sure that Steve and Alex had a winning vision for the organization.
“Buying the Mets has been weird,” Cohen said. “There’s a lot more pressure. People say, are you going to do this? And I’m like, I don’t have anything to do with this — like guys on the field. My dad is going to be 91 in August. I’m like, they gotta win a World Series for this man before he leaves this earth!”
This year, Steve and Alex Cohen will celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary after meeting for the first time in 1990 through a dating service. They each received binders full of pictures and information about each other. Alex was 25 when she first met Steve, and though she had hesitations about being with him at first, eventually his charm and humor won her over. They met on a Friday, she called him again on a Sunday, and they’ve been inseparable ever since.
“I met Steve, and I said, ‘If you marry me, you marry my family,’ ” Cohen recalled. “And my parents moved in with us. They lived with us until I was 47, and then someone gave me a T-shirt that said, “I Still Live With My Parents” and I was like, ‘Uhhh, you guys gotta go.’ So we built them a house right next door. So they’re always close to us.”
'Giving back is my way of life'
While Cohen’s philanthropic mentality was instilled in her by her mom from a young age, her efforts to give back kicked into gear after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. One day after 9/11, the Cohen’s pledged $5 million to help families of the victims of the attacks.
“She lets what’s going on in the world and what’s going on in her life really direct her giving and what the foundation does,” Melino said. “It’s personal. She’s just a good person. It’s so genuine. She’s not looking for attention.”
Now, 20 years later, the Steve and Alex Foundation has given a total of $989 million to causes that have a personal connection, including improving children’s healthcare and education, fighting hunger, helping underserved populations and communities, protecting the environment, improving access to the mental health for veterans, and furthering medical research, particularly in the areas of COVID-19 and Lyme disease.
Cohen said: “People ask Steve, ‘Does Alex spend a lot of money?’ And he says, ‘No, she gives it all away.’ ”
But Cohen doesn’t just sit at an office and write checks all day. She also takes her show on the road, as with her Giving Tour in 2016, which saw her take family and friends on a bus trip across the middle of America in search of nonprofit organizations to support.
“She’d be like, ‘How many people are working today, including your busboys and your dishwasher?’ And everyone would get $100,” Melino said of the Giving Tour. “We were just passing through. It really meant a lot to her to see what was happening in the middle of the country.”
And when the COVID-19 pandemic began to crest in March 2020, she took to calling hospitals and simply asking them, “What do you need?” New York City hospitals needed iPads so family members could communicate with their in-patient loved ones. So Cohen bought and donated hundreds of iPads.
Now Cohen’s main role for the Mets is growing the Amazin’ Mets Foundation, which raised just over $3.8 million in its first year and funded around $1.9 million in grants and contributions to about 58 organizations that support underserved communities in Queens. Some notable grant recipients include the Chinese-American Planning Council, New York Hall of Science, Flushing YMCA, Queens Public Library, and Korean Community Services.
Cohen loves taking an active role in her foundation — with offices based out of Stanford, Connecticut, Hudson Yards, and Citi Field — even when it means being on her feet, sometimes for 12 hours a day, liaising with community partners, dotting Citi Field, chatting up Mets diehards, and in those precious in-between moments, carving out quality time with the New York native’s friends and loved ones.
But she’s still learning how to govern a self-described Type-A personality with some remaining health Lyme-related health constraints, like cognitive disabilities. Unless there’s an event, Cohen intentionally ends her day at 4 o’clock. Embedded into everything that comes with being Tia Alex and Uncle Steve, Cohen has learned to decompress with meditations, taking breaks with walks, eating better and worrying less.
Managing her health is far more important than managing everything else, even the Mets. But still, she is convinced even the limitations she began to experience 15 years ago allow her to leave an enduring legacy. Cohen is fully aware she was able to mostly recover from Lyme disease largely because of her wealth. But she doesn’t want people who don’t have that privilege to suffer in silence. Her legacy, she hopes, will resound even louder than the streets of Flushing on an October night if her hometown team can recapture their glory.
“We’re the largest private funder of Lyme disease research in the world right now,” Cohen said. “We have changed things. For me, that’s important. There are people who get cancer, they heal, and they just move on with their life. But they’ve been given that for a reason. For me, Lyme disease became a goal of not only finding a diagnostic, but of finding a cure and a treatment. And I’ll always have that goal.”
