A Greenwich Village building owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is a sewage-spewing powder keg waiting to explode, according to a new lawsuit by a former commercial tenant.
Eran Wasjwol ran a franchise location of the upscale grilled cheese chain Meltkraft at 101 MacDougal St. from 2014 until this past summer, when he vacated the space after a series of sewage leaks and out of concerns over an illegal electrical connection, according to his lawsuit.
Kushner bought the five-story building in 2015 and was largely an absent landlord, Wasjwol says in court papers.
Wasjwol’s company, Valley Shepherd 442 LLC, is suing KC3 – 101 MacDougal Street, LLC, which owns the property.
The suit says that entity is controlled by Ivanka Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner.
Kushner is not personally named in the suit.
“Reaching the new landlord proved very difficult,” the Manhattan civil suit says.
First Wasjwol realized that the building was either stealing electricity from the main line or from another building when the panini heaters short-circuited, the suits says.
Then he discovered that the 96-year-old sewage system was faulty, causing the pipes to repeatedly back up and seep sewage out from under the eatery’s floorboards, according to court papers.
Wasjwol says Kushner mostly ignored his requests for repairs and he had to close the store to clean up the filth at his own expense.
“Feces were everywhere, forcing now-disgruntled employees to clean the space,” the suit says.
The situation turned nightmarish when “waste-feeding insects infested the space beneath the floorboards and no amount of extermination would rid the space of them,” according to court papers.
Wasjwol finally shuttered the sandwich shop in July, wary that the building’s rigged electricity could cause a deadly blast.
He “was concerned for his staff and his remaining customers (those not frightened away by the sewage issues) due to the illegal electrical connection and the recent explosion on 2nd Avenue in New York City,” the suit says.
He’s suing for $550,000.
“Meltkraft is a high-end sandwich shop that was forced to close due to the reoccurrence of human feces and what appears to be an absentee landlord who was unable or unwilling to remedy the underlying issue,” Wasjwol’s lawyers, Yan Margolin and Neil Postrygacz, said in a statement.
A spokesman for Kushner declined to immediately comment. Kushner’s company, 101 MacDougal St. LLC, is also suing Meltkraft for $48,000 for breaking the lease. That case, filed in September in Manhattan Supreme Court, is still pending.
Kushner was one of Trump’s closest confidants during the campaign and was spotted strolling the White House grounds last week with President Barack Obama’s chief of staff.