We already knew that some city landlords have been prohibiting tenants from smoking inside their apartments because of the pervasiveness and dangers of second-hand smoke—but what happens when you're allowed to smoke in your apartment, go out of your way to not disturb your neighbors with it, and you still get sued? Upper East Side cigar smoker Harry Dale is in such a situation. He's being sued by his neighbors Russell and Amanda Poses, despite truly trying his best to not disturb them with his smoke: "Oh, you're kidding me...[Russell] says his son has asthma. The amount of secondhand smoke that child has been exposed to from my cigars is minimal. The exhaust from the city buses is worse."
Dale says the argument has been going for more than a year: "I thought we rectified it. The Poses are absolutely unreasonable." Dale, whose wife died last year of a stroke, claims that he takes most of his smoke breaks outside, uses three air cleaners in his third-floor co-op and even hired a specialist to try to seal off his apartment. But the Poses say that Dale has been "maliciously" and "spitefully" trying to smoke them out, and that their two young children have lost sleep, suffered headaches, chest pains, and respiratory ailments. "It's pungent enough that you can't eat dinner. I've got two children, and I couldn't let them in their own playroom," said Russell Poses.
In 2006, a Manhattan judge ruled that secondhand smoke is a breach of the "warrant of habitability," a provision of state law that says tenants are entitled to a "livable, safe and sanitary" apartment. The way things are going, you won't be able to smoke in your apartment, pedestrian plazas, or cigar bars, and who'd want that?
