Blank v. Evens

Headnote

Beal property — easements — action to restrain erection of apartment house — when complaint properly dismissed.

Blank v. Evens, 205 App. Div. 897 , affirmed.

Appeal, by permission, from a judgment of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court in the second judicial department, entered February 27, 1923, unanimously affirming a judgment in favor of defendant entered upon a dismissal of the complaint by the court on trial at

Special Term. The action was brought to restrain defendant from erecting an apartment house upon land abutting on President street in the borough of Brooklyn.' The action was predicated upon the claim that a plan of restriction against the erection of apartment houses on President street was created by the Eastern Parkway Company, the common grantor of all the parties to this suit, partly by covenants inserted in several deeds and partly by an extensive newspaper advertising campaign conducted by the company. The deeds of the defendant and his immediate grantor contained no mention of the plan of restriction created by the said Eastern Parkway Company. The trial justice, however, found that they both had knowledge of the plan sufficient to bind them thereto in equity. The complaint was dismissed upon the ground that the owners of 825 feet out of a possible 1,300 feet of land on this block, such owners being the predecessors in title of all three of the plaintiffs, had abandoned such oral plan and any uniform plan of restriction in 1908,. years before any of the plaintiffs had obtained their title.