Smoke issue: Bono lights a fire under building’s board
The rocker-activist is embroiled in a flap over fireplaces at his Manhattan apartment building.
The U2 frontman has told co-op board members at the stately San Remo that smoke from other residents’ fireplaces is wafting into the penthouse duplex he shares with his family, The New York Times reported.
One of his adversaries is a fellow rocker, Billy Squier, best known for 1980s songs like The Stroke. The two live in the San Remo, a multi-storey building with twin towers that loom over Central Park West.
The dispute is over whether hazardous smoke from fireplaces, including Mr Squier’s, is drifting from chimneys into the penthouse duplex where Bono lives with his wife and four children.
The building’s fireplaces had longstanding problems, said Leni May, the wife of board member Peter May.
“Bono was so nice,” she said. “He said, ‘Listen, whatever I can do to get these things working, but it’s emptying into my apartment and I can’t have smoke like that.’”
The singer told the board that one of his four children had asthma, Ms May said.
Principle Management, the company that manages U2, said the singer was raising a safety concern, not a personal grievance.
“This is not a Bono issue,” a representative said. “It’s a building issue. It’s about health and safety regulations.”
The 1930 building has had several other celebrity residents, including actor Dustin Hoffman and actress Diane Keaton.
The building’s board famously said no to Madonna when she tried to buy an apartment there in 1985.
Bono bought his apartment from Apple chief executive Steve Jobs, said the listing broker, Roger Erickson, a senior managing director at Sothebys International Realty. Bono, whose real name is Paul Hewson, and his wife, Ali Hewson, also have homes in Dublin and the south of France.
He was in Germany this week to push for more aid to Africa from the world’s biggest industrial countries.
