Kaity Tong won’t be home for Christmas, or any time soon, she fears.
The Channel 11 news anchor has already missed several holidays at her Chelsea apartment, thanks to a toxic mold that has forced her to flee.
“I’m beginning my fifth month in this hotel,” she said of the Gramercy Park Hotel, where she and her husband, Patrick Callahan, have been residing since July.
They have abandoned a three-bedroom, three-bathroom, 2,400-square-foot duplex penthouse with a terrace of more than 1,000 square feet for a one-bedroom, one-bathroom hotel suite of just 500 square feet.
“I never thought that I’d be living like this,” she lamented. “My son can’t come home from college for Thanksgiving because there’s no place for him to stay. And my dog [a Siberian husky] has been in a kennel and will probably remain there through Christmas.”
Tong and Callahan first noticed the problem last summer, when a large wall section and flooring began to buckle in their pad on West 20th Street. The damage, they believed, was coming from construction in an adjoining condominium building.
Complaints about the water damage to Elad Properties – the high-profile developer of the O’Neill, the building in question next door – went unanswered until the couple retained lawyer Steven Wagner to look into the problem.
It was discovered that highly toxic mold was growing throughout the apartment. Wagner also found that the apartment directly below Tong’s had experienced major flooding earlier and that Elad Properties had gone into that unit several times to do repairs.
Elad agreed in a letter to pay for the couple’s $600-a-night lodgings and repair the damage.
A Page Six story revealed last September that Elad had not paid any money toward the newscaster’s lodgings, which was more than $31,000.
“She will be totally and completely reimbursed,” Elad spokesman Lloyd Kaplan said at the time. “A leak came from somewhere, but we’re not sure whether it even came from our side.”
A short time later, Elad ponied up the cash.
“They haven’t paid anything since then,” said Tong, who estimates her bill, minus incidentals and taxes, is more than $50,000. “Now they’re saying that their [independent] tests show that the damage isn’t coming from their side and that it’s OK to go back.”
“That’s absolutely false,” Wagner added. “Their tests were incomplete.”
Tong says: “The Gramercy Park Hotel is a wonderful place, but I really want my home and my life back. The apartment is still torn up, and two of the rooms are cordoned off with plastic – and there’s still mold.”
She also pointed out that she is highly allergic to the spores.
Kaplan now says a third party will come in to determine where the leak is coming from and determine who should reimburse whom.
“That is an agreement between Kaity’s building and Elad, not us,” Wagner said. “We’re not recognizing that determination of those parties. We have an agreement in writing from Elad that says they are responsible for the repair and payments.”