Bedbugs are biting on the Lower East Side – and may soon be gnawing on the rest of the Big Apple, a Manhattan judge is warning.
Housing Court Judge Cyril Bedford delivered the dire pestilence prediction in a ruling giving a Ludlow Street man a 45 percent break on his rent because of a “hellish” bedbug problem.
Peter Young, 41, said he realized he had a problem last June, when he started waking up in the middle of the night in his $1,025-a-month studio covered in “bite marks,” Bedford’s decision said.
He figured out what was chewing on him towards the end of the month, when his landlord at 165 Ludlow Street put up a notice that an exterminator was coming to deal with “bed bugs.”
The extermination didn’t work – and the condition got worse. “Over the next few months, [Young] employed four methods to attempt a restful night of sleep – none of which proved effective,” the decision says.
Young, a flute player working as a waiter, did everything he could to combat the problem – throwing out his couch, “an armoire, a shelf, books drapes, towels, linens and clothes . . . everything except family heirlooms,” the decision says.
He eventually stopped paying his rent because the “situation was unacceptable,” he told The Post.
Young’s lawyer, Steven De Castro, said the landlord “finally put down the right kind of poison in December,” and the invasion stopped. The landlord, Ludlow Properties, sued for the unpaid rent.
The judge, who said the action was the first Housing Court bedbug case since the 1900s, said Young only had to pay 55 percent of the rent for the time he had the pests – which he warned are on the rise.
“With time, the prevalence of cases in which bedbugs are involved is sure to increase to an epidemic as the foothold the bedbugs have obtained in the urban setting of [the] city of New York grows ever larger,” Bedford wrote.
The problem is still going on in Young’s building and buildings next door, residents said.
One, an actor who just gave his name as Angel, said he’s attacked daily by the bugs, and sleeps “two hours at a time.”
The landlord’s lawyer, Robert Erlich, said his client is doing everything it can to solve the problem, which he said is “caused by tenants” and is not the fault of the building.
Meanwhile, two Mexican businessmen who sued Leona Helmsley’s Park Lane Hotel claiming they were devoured by bedbugs there have settled their case for $150,000, records show.
Ventura Arrangoiz and Ventura Requejo filed suit against the five-star hotel last year, claiming they were consumed by bedbugs in their hotel room last June, and that the pesky pests then “hitched a ride” back with them to Mexico, where they infested their home.
Bed-bug bites:
Appearance: Brown, flat, round and one-quarter to three-eighths-inch long – until mealtime. After about 10 minutes of feeding on (usually) human blood, they turn dark red and nearly double their size.
Life cycle: Adult females lay about 200 eggs in beds and floor cracks.
Hiding Places: In mattress seams, bed springs, sheets, comforters and pillowcases; also in cracks and crevices of beds and floors