Make sure you're keeping those pesky dryer ducts clean: it turns out that the fire that destroyed Robert De Niro's fifth-floor Upper West Side apartment was started by dryer lint buildup. As your mother might have told you when she first taught you how to do your own laundry, leaving those soft little lint balls unattended can be really dangerous; this particularly feisty blaze, which broke out around 2 p.m. at 88 Central Park West, took about an hour for firefighters to bring down, and caused some pretty significant damage to apartments on the building's fourth and sixth floors.
Despite the extensive damage, no one was hurt, and a spokesman for De Niro says the Taxi Driver and Little Fockers star, who reportedly paid a cool $23 million for the two-unit, 15 room apartment, was out of the country yesterday.
The swanky 11-story building, which is located near W. 68h St., is no stranger to celebrity calamity; last year, one of its apartments was a key player in a legal struggle between Oscar-winning actress Celeste Holm's husband and sons.
