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 crisis 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 eating him toward the end of the month, when his landlord at 165 Ludlow Street put up a notice that an exterminator was coming to deal with “bedbugs.”
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 notes.
Young told The Post he eventually stopped paying his rent because the “situation was unacceptable.”
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 early 1900s, ruled Young had to pay only 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 gave his name only 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.
Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Helmsley, said his client settled “to avoid a long and expensive litigation.” He noted that the father and son businessmen are “applying some of the settlement” in trade for future stays at the five-star Central Park South hotel.