New York suffered a brutal blow to its ego last week when Madonna said she was totally over Manhattan. “It’s not the exciting place it used to be,” the singer said. “It still has great energy; I still put my finger in the socket. But it doesn’t feel alive.”
So when The Observer found a real estate record filed just this morning that said Bono and his wife Ali Hewson had sold their Central Park West apartment, it seemed crushing. Could Madonna and Bono both be abandoning New York in the same short span? No.
According to the $4.9 million deed, the co-op is Bono’s old 2,322-square-foot apartment at the El Dorado at 90th Street and Central Park West.
He first bought the place for $3.4 million, but left it five years ago for Steve Jobs’ old apartment at the San Remo down the block. (Mr. Jobs sold the place for around $14.5 million, less than the reported $15 million he spent on renovations that involved both Robert A.M. Stern and I.M. Pei.)
Even though Bono bought that co-op in April 2003, he put the El Dorado apartment on the market in March 2006 for $5.95 million, a brokerage database shows, though the price was reduced to $5.5 million in June. Instead of the 12-foot, 800-pound doors in his new co-op, this littler place has two petite bedrooms, a nicer-sized master suite, and a 320-square-foot terrace and living room facing Central Park. All that now goes, the deed says, to a couple from Westchester.
But life for Bono at the San Remo hasn’t been entirely perfect: He squabbled with neighbors, including lesser arena rock star Billy Squier, over hazardous smoke wafting up into his penthouse duplex.
