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171 A.D. 148

Schoonmaker v. Heckscher

Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York · decided 1916-01-31

Appeal by the plaintiffs, Sylvanus L. Schoonmaker and others, from a judgment of the Supreme Court in favor of the defendant, entered in the office of the clerk of the county of New York on the 4th day of December, 1915, upon the decision of the court dismissing the complaint at the opening on a trial at the New York Special Term.

Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know

Decided 1916-01-31

How this case has been cited

Cited by 6 later decisions — most recently June 2017

2 federal appellate · 1 state decisions

3019161920193019401950196019701980199020002010decided

Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.

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Laughlin, J. (dissenting):

¶1It is conceded that the agreement containing the restrictive covenant was drawn by one of the most able counsel of his day. I am opinion that if he understood that the parties intended to have the restriction extend only to the lots owned by them within the area described in the opinion of Mr. Justice Page, he would have indicated the restricted area by stating that it extended to the lots owned by the parties within the area bounded by Thirty-eighth street, Lexington avenue, a line midway between Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth streets and Madison avenue, or bounded by Thirty-eighth street, Lexington avenue, Thirty-fourth street and Madison avenue, including the street lots on the southerly side of Thirty-fourth street between said avenues, instead of employing upwards of fifty words to specify the street lots and the avenue lots. It is reasonable, I think, if it was not intended that the restriction should extend to the lots on the westerly side of Madison avenue, that a plain simple description, such as I have indicated, would have been employed, instead of the words found in the agreement, “lying on each side of 34, 35, 36 & 37th Streets and on the south side of 38th Street lying between Madison Avenue on the westerly side and Lexington Avenue on the easterly, and also on said Madison Avenue, Lexington Avenue and 4th Avenue. ” The manifest purpose, I think, of adopting the method employed was to show the intention of the parties to extend the restrictive covenant to all street lots *153owned by them shown on the map of the Murray Hill estate, to which reference is made in the agreement, lying between Madison avenue on the west and Lexington avenue on the east, and Thirty-eighth street on the north, and Thirty-fourth street on the south, including also the street lots on the southerly side of Thirty-fourth street between Madison avenue and Lexington avenue, and all lots owned by the parties shown on said map fronting on either side of any of the three avenues, with the possible exception of the two lots on Madison avenue north of Thirty-eighth street which are not in question here.

¶2I, therefore, vote for reversal.

¶3Judgment affirmed, with costs.

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