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Down on Bush Street, near Taylor, a gang of workmen, working steadily each day for about three weeks, has just finished chipping one inch and seven-eights of concrete from the side wall of a market building. It was a slow job and an expensive one. The owner was forced to resort to this after an offer of hundreds of dollars for little more than an inch of the adjoining property—a vacant lot—was turned down by the attorneys for the owner. It seems that a survey of the market building showed that the concrete wall facing the vacant lot had bulged over a small area of the wall surface, so that it extended for the inch and seven-eights over the adjoining vacant lot. The owners of the lot were given an offer for the purchase of the almost hairline strip of ground over which the building bulged. But that offer was spurned. And sol scaffoldings were erected laborers put to work, and piece-by-piece the protruding wall of concrete was chipped. The ob took three weeks. Realty men watching the slow process of the job were reminded of a case in New York where the wall of a ten-story building bulged two inches over an adjoining vacant lot. The owner of the building offered the holder of the lot a sum more than enough to cover the value of the two inches of land. The owner was obdurate. He demanded that the protruding wall be chipped for the entire ten stories until the bulging of two inches of wall were taken off his property. But the owner of the building had an eye for retribution. He hired his workmen and ordered them to take off not two inches, but three. In due time, the owner of the lot prepared to build. He had his building, a 15-story office structure, put up plumb against the adjoining structure. The owner of the first building waited until the other one was up. Then he notified the owner that the 15-story structure overlapped one inch on the next-door property. And for 15 stories the once-stubborn landowner had to chip the concrete wall of his building until the inch was taken off. The Wasp The Scout December 15, 1917 |
