Hannah Moskowitz Takes Her, ah, Lap in the City Council

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The New York Sun

At 10:20 a.m. yesterday, Eva Moskowitz was pushing her 3-month-old, Hannah Grannis Moskowitz, in a stroller – but she wasn’t taking a walk in the park.


She was wheeling her way into the City Council chambers to participate in a hearing on proposed local laws that would regulate emissions from school buses, sanitation trucks, and sightseeing buses.


While little Hannah peeped at the public and looked up at her mother, grasping at her suit jacket, the Upper East Side legislator was multitasking: listening to colleagues and the witnesses while patting Hannah’s back, making silly faces at the baby, and bouncing her when she seemed restless.


“She seems indifferent at the moment to the politics and government,” Ms. Moskowitz said in an interview. “But she’s a happy camper.”


Ms. Moskowitz, chairwoman of the committee on education, said she takes both being a council member and being a mother “very seriously.”


Sometimes, she said, that means the two responsibilities overlap.


“It can’t be the case that mothers are not allowed to be elected officials,” she said. “If you set up all sorts of rules about what you can and cannot do, that’s going to make it very difficult for mothers to participate. I have never found that my being a mother has impeded my ability to conduct myself professionally and give my all to the job.”


She said her dual role means she has to be constantly “multitasking in a way that perhaps others aren’t.”


Hannah had just passed the 2-month mark when she first appeared at the building her older brother, Culver Grannis Moskowitz, a first-grader, calls “the castle.” Since then, she’s been at City Hall almost as frequently as some people who work there.


Hannah has attended press conferences and hearings. She’s even accompanied her mother to live television appearances. At one sit-down meeting with reporters this month, Ms. Moskowitz, who is 40,was asked by a radio correspondent to move Hannah and her babyish burbling away from the microphone, to improve the sound bite. But most of Hannah’s time at the center of city government has been spent sleeping. Sometimes when Hannah wakes up at an awkward time, a Moskowitz aide will leap to the rescue.


This isn’t the first time Ms. Moskowitz has brought a child to the council, which has no rules about whether members or staff can bring children to work.


When she was elected in 1999, Culver was 1-and-a-half. He came to work for weekend budget hearings when his lawyer-father was working and there was no child care.


When the council member’s second son, Dillon Moskowitz Grannis, was born a year and a half ago, Ms. Moskowitz had just created the council’s policy on parental leave for members and staff. Though she was entitled to months of leave under the policy, Ms. Moskowitz came to work a week or two after her son was born – when Mayor Bloomberg vetoed her school construction accountability act.


Dillon came to City Hall regularly for about five months before he started staying home with a babysitter or his grandparents.


One of Ms. Moskowitz’s council colleagues, John Liu of Queens, said: “Eva’s got an important job, being a mother, and she’s also got another important job, being a council member.”


He said he understands what she’s going through. Just yesterday, Mr. Liu brought his 3-year-old son, Joseph, to a 7 a.m. live television appearance, before driving him to preschool.


“I think it’s amazing that she can fulfill all of these responsibilities simultaneously,” the Flushing Democrat said. “And I think it’s a sign of the times that at this point people don’t even look twice.”


Mr. Liu said City Hall is comparatively child-friendly, but he said it might be more attractive with some sets of plastic building blocks.


“How much can they cost? A few boxes of Legos?” he said.


Another council member, David Yassky, said he’s “all for” children in City Hall. “We want to make sure political life is hospitable to parents, particularly parents of young children,” he said, adding that he has had to bring his daughters, ages 5 and 10, to press conferences and to work on weekends when his wife is busy and there’s no babysitter available.


Despite that, Mr. Yassky doesn’t expect lots of children running around the back of hearings anytime soon. Most of them, he noted, are in school.


The New York Sun

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