Law-‘soot’ vs. luxury co-op board

A high-end interior designer says his Gramercy Park penthouse co-op has for years been decorated in very unfashionable black soot that blows in from a ventilation system, causing him health problems and turning his “dream apartment into a complete nightmare.”

In a $1 million Manhattan Supreme Court suit, Timothy Whealon claims that “a mysterious black soot has been infiltrating” his 60 Gramercy Park North apartment for at least five years.

In 2012, Whealon moved out during a million-dollar gut renovation that in- cluded installing new airtight windows and a central-air unit, the suit says, but when he moved back in the next year “tremendous amounts of black soot began to accumulate on the walls and ceilings of the apartment and Mr. Whealon began to cough up blackened phlegm.”

By hiring his own experts, doctors and engineers, he found out that “toxic combusted fuel oil” from the building’s poorly ventilated boiler room was coming up an elevator shaft and being sucked like a vacuum through his new air-conditioning unit, the suit says.

Whealon’s lawyer, Justin Singer, said “The defendants’ abject indifference to the health and safety of their residents is abhorrent.”

Neither the building’s management company nor a lawyer representing the building returned requests for comment.