The Billionaire Upstairs

With apartment combining and major renovations reaching new extremes, just remember: you could have it worse. You could be living downstairs from billionaire mogul David Geffen, whose gut-renovation of his Fifth Avenue penthouse duplex has left downstairs neighbors with cracked walls, sooty apartments, serious health problems, and a level of fury that usually leads to a courtroom.

In a lawsuit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, Howard and Gloria Schwartz are seeking $2 million in damages and $500,000 in attorneys’ fees from Geffen, the Daily News reports. Geffen bought the apartment in 2012 for $54 million and began the renovation project last year. “That’s when (their) nightmare began,” the Schwartzes’ lawyer, Steven Sladkus, says in court papers.

The couple has company in the building, which faces out on the Plaza Hotel and Central Park. Court papers say theirs is among 17 shareholder complaints filed against Geffen, who has so far addressed only six of them. The suit names Geffen, his contractors, the co-op, and the co-op’s engineer.