The $26,000-a-Month Eviction Fight at 150 Charles

Intelligencer The Cut Vulture The Strategist Curbed Grub Street Subscribe The owners say their tenants are squatters. The tenants say they moved into a mess — but won’t leave. Cathy Crane and Salvatore Trentalancia have been embroiled in a year-plus-long lawsuit for possession of their luxury condo at 150 Charles. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Douglas Elliman Cathy Crane and Salvatore Trentalancia have been embroiled in a year-plus-long lawsuit for possession of their luxury condo at 150 Charles. Photo-Illustration: Curbed; Photo: Douglas Elliman Cathy Crane probably would have been happier had she just left her apartment empty. The mindfulness instructor and former Cosmos researcher had uprooted herself from New York City to Denver in 2023 to take care of her mother, and she and her husband, Salvatore Trentalancia, began renting out their luxury condo on the second floor of 150 Charles Street. On the surface, Erica Terwillegar perhaps seemed like an ideal tenant: A Team USA luger in the 1988 and 1992 Winter Olympics, Erica had since turned to jewelry design, cultivating a small following with her Victorian- and gothic-inspired pieces that once brought a fan to tears. Her partner, Peter Molinari, had a background in construction and affordable housing and had recently started a company working in toxic-waste remediation. It was enough that, in July 2024, Erica signed a lease for Cathy and Salvatore’s two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath furnished apartment for $26,000 a month. That September, Erica and Peter, along with her mother, moved in. The 15-story complex at 150 Charles is a downtown “It” building, one that has attracted celebrities and members of the 0.01 percent since sales launched in 2013. Ben Stiller, Jon Bon Jovi, and the model Irina Shayk all bought apartments in the glass-and-brick towers overlooking the West Side Highway, and Ryan Seacrest reportedly made his way in as a renter. They’re drawn by its floor-to-ceiling windows and Hudson River views, plus the porte-cochere that allows discreet access to $500,000 parking spaces away from paparazzi and nosy neighbors. (The 75-foot lap pool and garden courtyard lined with redbuds and ferns are nice perks too.) More recently, the building has been in the headlines over the staggering amounts people are willing to pay to live there: A $60 million sale for a duplex set a record for downtown Manhattan last year, and in 2023, a former Credit Suisse executive reportedly sold a five-bedroom penthouse for $52 million. “There are highly qualified, well-established captains of industry living in the building and on the board, and they’re constantly putting more money back into it,” explained Douglas Elliman’s Eklund-Gomes co-founder John Gomes, who owns a two-bedroom at 150 Charles. “It’s a really well-maintained, well-run building filled with really amazing people.” At this level of wealth, residents may expect not just radiant-floor heating but also a degree of insulation from the ugliness of daily life. Yet according to a squabbly set of lawsuits, the Trentalancia-Cranes and the Terwillegar-Molinaris soon fell into a dispute that sounds more like a run-of-the-mill landlord-tenant scrap, with a slew of claims and counterclaims, large and small, and a good chunk of money on the line: The owners allege that Erica and Peter didn’t pay their utilities and overstayed their lease to the tune of more than $300,000; the tenants, meanwhile, allege they’ve had to live in “filth and disarray,” with the dryer and other appliances on the fritz, plus the owners’ shoes, loofahs, and suitcases cluttering up the space. “I’ve never heard of anything like this happening, and I have had tenants for the past eight years,” Gomes says. “I’ve never even so much as had a late payment because it’s that type of a building.” There are also more substantial matters on the table, even beyond the six figures demanded by the owners for the extended stay. They also allege that Peter and Erica blocked a potential multimillion-dollar sale of the apartment by refusing to allow showings. “To date We have been unable to get access to show the Premises and instead Respondents have made the incredible claim that they [h]ave the right to purchase the Premises,” Cathy said in an affidavit this past December. The lease required that tenants allow such access, yet their lawyer, Colleen Kerwick, claims that the owners’ attorneys never presented that clause and that she and her clients suspected the potential buyer was fictitious. Then there’s the fact that Erica and Peter simply haven’t left. According to the lawsuits, more than six months before the apartment’s one-year lease expired at the end of July 2025, Cathy and Salvatore gave the renters notice. But even after repeatedly complaining that the space was “uninhabitable,” Erica and Peter still wanted to renew. On August 1, 2025, the day after the lease lapsed, Cathy and Salvatore sued for possession of their home in Manhattan housing court. Since then, the tenants have not paid a cent to live there. “We remain responsible for paying the utilities and condominium fees,” Cathy’s affidavit reads. “Yet Respondents continue to live for free at our expense in our home.” Surely, this all could have been prevented? Perhaps. There were signs of potential trouble early on, such as the condo board allegedly not wanting the owners to rent their home to Erica and Peter, relenting only after a “contentious vetting process,” per Cathy’s affidavit. How extensive that process was is unclear since Stuart Romanoff, the board president, declined to comment. But an owners representative claims that part of the problem was Erica and Peter dragging their feet on providing backup documents for their application package. “It seems they were reluctant to get them financial information,” the rep says. (In court documents, Erica and Peter allege the apartments’ owners cashed their checks for the first month’s rent and security deposit before the board approved them and then attempted to interfere with the application process.) Cathy and Salvatore’s lawsuit, along with a second suit filed in Manhattan supreme court seeking damages over the tenants’ continued occupancy, paints a picture of Erica and Peter as grifters who have spent more than a year in a luxury building without paying — accusations they’ve faced before. Cathy and Salvatore are looking for at least $327,600 for the use of their apartment since the lease lapsed, a minimum of $30,000 for unpaid utilities, and $6.75 million for the apartment sale they apparently lost, plus penalties, attorneys’ fees, and other damages. At the very least, Cathy said in her December affidavit, the couple shouldn’t be living there for free as litigation drags on. “Justice requires Respondents to pay to continue residing in the Premises,” she said. Justice moves slowly. A listing photo of the Trentalancia-Cranes’ home at 150 Charles that showcased the building’s distinctive floor-to-ceiling windows and was shared with Peter Molinari and Erica Terwillegar. Photo: SERHANT As you might expect, Erica and Peter tell an entirely different story. For several months now, they have maintained their position that the lease was properly renewed, the rent and utility fees were paid on time, and they are the legal occupants. And in counterclaims filed in the Manhattan supreme court case and a separate suit brought by Peter last month, the couple allege they have been in a landlords-from-hell situation. Cathy and Salvatore, as the counterclaims filing reads, “violated the sanctity and security of the home of an American Olympian who represented her country on the world stage, treating her as an unpaid housesitter for an apartment they refused to relinquish.” (Peter, in his own suit, alleges the apartment’s owners violated his “privacy and peace of mind.”) Moving into the building had apparently been a dream of Peter’s since it went up. He says he has lived within a five-block radius in the neighborhood for more than 40 years, having worked in decades past on gut-rehab conversions of the nearby former factories; Erica, meanwhile, has operated her jewelry studio out of a nearby brownstone since 2006. Peter says he missed a chance to buy in the building around 2013 because “things were going on in my life.” (According to federal-court records, Molinari filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy that year; the case was eventually dismissed.) When, two years ago, Peter’s attorney called him with news that this two-bedroom rental was newly available, “I said, ‘It can’t be,’” he tells me. (For what it’s worth, apartments do come up regularly in the building, to buy or rent.) On the day Erica and Peter moved into 150 Charles, their attorney claims, they were greeted with a cluttered and dirty space that didn’t square with the $26,000-a-month rent. According to one court filing, walls were streaked with mold and had been left unpainted despite promises for a refresh, and the light fixtures above the table were layered with dust. In photos of the space I saw, almost every Molteni cabinet, walk-in closet, or wicker basket the tenants could have used to store their own belongings is full — a mess of family photo albums, clothes, and personal documents. Even a pair of loofahs, presumably used, were supposedly left hanging in the bathroom. “You opened the cabinets in the kitchen and there were books in there. A Buddha statue!” Kerwick says, recalling a visit she made in the couple’s first week at 150 Charles. “I felt uncomfortable being there, as though I had intruded in someone’s space.” Plans to throw Peter’s 65th-birthday party at the couple’s new home were canceled because, according to court documents, it would not “reflect well” on them to their friends and family. The couple allegedly made no noise about the owners’ belongings still being in the apartment during walk-throughs, according to Cathy’s affidavit, but after moving in, they allegedly packed the stuff up in 35 boxes without notice and had them taken off-site. (Kerwick says no walk-throughs occurred.) Somehow, the tenants say, things managed only to get worse. They claim the apartment began falling apart, as the master bedroom’s mechanized window blinds, the Sub-Zero fridge, and the bathroom faucets weren’t working properly. “It’s been horrible living there,” Peter says. “This is not normal. This is not normal if you’re living in Section 8 housing.” They claim this warrants compensation; Erica also says she was getting billed for a landline she alleged Cathy and Salvatore were still using. “Sometimes, the most difficult tenants could have serious, legit gripes that aren’t being attended to,” Leonard Steinberg, a Compass broker and former 150 Charles resident, says. “If you don’t address them quickly, you can get yourself into hot water.” But Carol Anne Herlihy, a housing attorney who has represented tenants and landlords, expresses some suspicion over the Terwillegar-Molinaris’ drive to fight in the courts given that they have characterized the apartment as borderline squalid. If the place is actually the disaster the couple claim it to be, Herlihy says, they could have broken the lease over the owners’ misrepresentation and bounced — perhaps even to another unit at 150 Charles. “Them simultaneously stating it’s uninhabitable and we’re going to fight to the death to stay here, to me, is a mark of bad faith,” she tells me. “It suggests to me that the conditions aren’t that bad.” I asked that very question of Peter: Why fight to stay in a $26,000-a-month apartment you allege is basically a dump? “Once I got into 150 Charles,” Peter says, “I wasn’t leaving.” A listing photo of a bedroom in the Trentalancia-Cranes’ home, which includes many of the owners’ furnishings that were left in place when their tenants moved in. Photo: SERHANT This, it turns out, is a feeling he has had elsewhere. Just before moving to 150 Charles, Peter and Erica had been involved in an eviction case right around the corner at 166 Perry Street, which lasted more than a year and a half. The allegations sound familiar: When the lease lapsed for a two-bedroom apartment with a monthly rent of $11,000, the couple allegedly refused to vacate. The apartment’s owner, a former Christie’s executive named Diane Upright, had been renting her corner unit in the undulating-glass building to Erica for years, but by 2022, she decided it was time to sell. Despite warning Erica in February that she and her family would have to move out in mid-November, the couple refused to leave and Upright sued for possession and damages. (Erica insisted in court records that she and Peter had been negotiating to buy the apartment from Upright and had entered a month-to-month tenancy by paying additional rent, but the owner quickly returned that money.) In that case, too, Erica and Peter not only lived nine months rent-free in the apartment until, as the case dragged on, a judge ordered them to start paying for use of the space, but Erica also criticized the conditions there. In an affidavit, she alleged unresolved issues with the doors, the sink, the windows, and a humming radiator that, she suggested, Upright was allowing to make noise as “a form of psychological torture.” The Perry Street litigation finally ended in August 2024 following an undisclosed settlement — just one month after Erica signed the lease for 150 Charles. The 150 Charles matter is also not the only eviction case Erica currently faces. This May, the owner of the building housing Erica’s jewelry studio moved to evict her business, having already sued in a separate case for more than $255,000 in unpaid rent. (Kerwick has disputed the eviction suit on technical grounds and argued in court records that Erica didn’t owe any rent.) The couple’s history isn’t lost on Cathy and Salvatore. “Public court records show that both are career litigants who have made similar, if not identical, disparaging claims about other condominium properties they have rented,” the owners tell me in a statement. “We believe this pattern speaks directly to the credibility of the claims made against us.” When I asked Peter about what happened on Perry Street — and how it looks like a near carbon copy of the fight at 150 Charles — he wouldn’t comment, citing the settlement agreement. (He did, however, note that there was no determination in the Perry Street case that he and Erica were holdovers.) The lawsuits, in his eyes, are simply cases of personal misfortune and landlord greed. “When I spoke to my attorney, I said, ‘Is this just my luck with these high-end buildings?’” Peter tells me. “With these extremely wealthy people, they’re not looking at you eye to eye; they’re looking down on you.” The back-to-back eviction lawsuits, however, caused many brokers and apartment owners I spoke with to ask the same question: How did anyone let them into 150 Charles? “Who is their broker? Who didn’t do the due diligence on this person?” one former resident asks me. “We’ve got people dying to live in 150 Charles. It’s not like there was no one else.” When I called the Serhant brokers who represented the apartment’s owners to ask how they vetted the renters, they declined to comment. (Steinberg also tells me the condo board’s members would have been loath to officially reject any rental candidate because, under the right of first refusal, the building would ultimately be on the hook for the rent.) Cathy and Salvatore didn’t answer my question about when exactly they learned of their tenants’ litigious past. But Herlihy, the housing attorney, notes it may not matter since the 2019 state housing law did ban blacklisting tenants over their history in housing court. (That’s not to say brokers and landlords always follow that rule to a tee: “If there’s any public information about a potential tenant, it’s hard to ignore,” a veteran broker who has worked in the building tells me.) Either way, Erica and Peter’s legal record also shows they have been sued a number of times for fraud and loan-nonpayment allegations. In 2019, the couple were sued by a New Jersey health-care entrepreneur who alleged they had defrauded her out of $275,000 she had invested in their construction company; the case went to arbitration. In 2018, a former owner of a shipbreaking company was awarded a $5.6 million default judgment against Peter in Texas state court following allegations that he had stolen stock amounting to a controlling interest in the business. (Kerwick denies Peter took any stock in the Texas case; in Manhattan supreme court, she has argued the judgment isn’t legitimate because Peter wasn’t properly served and, as a result, couldn’t defend himself in the Texas litigation.) And in 2008, the owner of a formalwear company won a roughly $850,000 judgment against Peter over unpaid loans to finance his business. (Several years after the judgment was issued, a marshal eventually seized and auctioned off Peter’s co-op apartment at 167 Perry Street.) This seems like a lot of time and money spent fending off lawsuits, some of which have been dismissed in their favor, but the couple’s lawyer says it’s all part of being well-off: “Peter gets sued because he has money, and usually wins,” Kerwick insists. “Some people love him, some people don’t.” For Cathy and Salvatore, this is a new — and pretty uncomfortable — experience. “We have never been involved in litigation before,” the couple tell me in their statement. “This has been a nightmare for us.” They are also claiming a degree of financial hardship, saying they do not live anywhere near the same financial stratosphere as some of their neighbors. “We are not wealthy people,” Cathy said in her affidavit. That’s relative, of course. The pair paid $4.6 million for their apartment in 2015, whereas a triplex in the building just sold for $14 million. Now, having already waited more than a year to retake possession of their apartment at 150 Charles, it looks as if they’ll have to hold out for a December trial. Peter and Erica seem just fine with that, and, according to the apartment owners’ attorney, “abjectly refuse to engage in any settlement discussion.” “Delay appears to be their goal while they continue to occupy our apartment rent-free and refuse access,” the owners say. When I asked brokers and building residents if they had ever seen an eviction battle of this magnitude in a place like 150 Charles, many told me it’s unheard of. The rarefied world many of the residents inhabit is a tiny one, the former resident tells me, meaning you wouldn’t be burning your reputation just among your neighbors. “In 150 Charles, there’s so many crossovers between myself and so many people in the building that you couldn’t just do whatever you wanted without forever consequences,” this person says. “You’ll be, like, the holdover person.” Peter and Erica, though, say they are merely Davids in a fight against superrich Goliaths at 150 Charles. Throughout our conversation and in court filings, Peter and his attorney repeatedly claimed the moral high ground. “Maybe I’m the voice of the little guy,” Peter says, before telling me he has worked on affordable-housing projects for the poor and for battered women and children as well as on Harlem revitalization projects — a résumé he repeated in his own countersuit against Cathy and Salvatore. Kerwick, who tells me her client has “impeccable ethics,” has a similar take on why Peter continues to litigate. “The behavior of these super-entitled wealthy landlords to force him out by these tactics,” she says of Peter, “encourages him to stay.” The $26,000-a-Month Eviction Fight at 150 Charles Your product is saved! You’ll receive emails when your saved products go on sale. Manage preferences. Every product is independently selected by editors. Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission. The Graza Olive-Oil People Are Designing Mamdani’s New Groceries Another Owner Aims to Restore the Chrysler Building’s Shine Art Collector Beth DeWoody Is Selling Her Upper East Side Apartment A Clinton Hill Townhouse Sets a Neighborhood Record for $9.4 Million Who Was the Man in 2B? The Graza Olive-Oil People Are Designing Mamdani’s New Groceries Another Owner Aims to Restore the Chrysler Building’s Shine A Clinton Hill Townhouse Sets a Neighborhood Record for $9.4 Million Art Collector Beth DeWoody Is Selling Her Upper East Side Apartment A Key to Gramercy Park for $825,000 (Apartment Included) The Graza Olive-Oil People Are Designing Mamdani’s New Groceries Another Owner Aims to Restore the Chrysler Building’s Shine Art Collector Beth DeWoody Is Selling Her Upper East Side Apartment A Clinton Hill Townhouse Sets a Neighborhood Record for $9.4 Million Who Was the Man in 2B? The Graza Olive-Oil People Are Designing Mamdani’s New Groceries Another Owner Aims to Restore the Chrysler Building’s Shine A Clinton Hill Townhouse Sets a Neighborhood Record for $9.4 Million Art Collector Beth DeWoody Is Selling Her Upper East Side Apartment A Key to Gramercy Park for $825,000 (Apartment Included)