Graham v. City of Chicago

• Decision Date: 17 December 1931
• Docket Number: No. 20899.,20899.
• Citation: 178 N.E. 911,346 Ill. 638
• Parties: GRAHAM v. CITY OF CHICAGO.
• Court: Illinois Supreme Court

346 Ill. 638

178 N.E. 911

GRAHAM

v.CITY OF CHICAGO.

No. 20899.

Supreme Court of Illinois.

Dec. 17, 1931.

Error to Appellate Court, First District, on Appeal from Superior Court, Cook County; George W. Bristow, Judge.

Action by Elise Graham against the City of Chicago. Judgment for plaintiff was affirmed by the Appellate Court (260 Ill. App. 590), and defendant brings certiorari.

Affirmed.

William H. Sexton, Corp. Counsel, and Alexander M. Smietanka, City Atty., both of Chicago (Roy S. Gaskill and Matilda Fenberg, both of Chicago, of counsel), for plaintiff in error.

Walter J. Miller and Walter L. Wenger, both of Chicago, for defendant in error.

JONES, J.

The plaintiff, Elise Graham, recovered a judgment against the city of Chicago in the superior court of Cook county for $16,000 damages for personal injuries. The judgment was affirmed by the Appellate Court, and the cause is brought to this court by certiorari.

The gist of the action as laid in the declaration is that the city of Chicago negligently permitted water from an adjacent playground to flow over and upon a sidewalk of said city during the month of January, 1926, by reason whereof the surface of the sidewalk became covered with ice, slippery, and unsafe for public travel; that defendant knew, or in the exercise of ordinary care would have known, of said unsafe condition; and that plaintiff, who was then passing along said sidewalk in the exercise of due care, slipped and fell upon the ice, and was thereby injured.

Ryerson school is a public school situated between Huron street on the north and Ohio street on the south. It is bounded on the east by Lawndale avenue. There are sidewalks running along the street adjacent to the school property on Ohio street and Lawndale avenue. The intersection of these streets is at the southeast corner of the school premises. An iron fence is maintained on the schoolyard within a foot or two of the property line. It had been a practice of the school authorities to flood the schoolyard in this corner in freezing weather in order to provide a skating place for pupils. As an aid to this project, a small earth ridge or dike about a foot high was constructed on school land a short distance from the fence. This construction was for the purpose of making a basin for water intended to be frozen. On January 12, 1926, the skating area was flooded, and overflow water was allowed to run across the walk. The weather was cold, and the water froze, creating an icy, slippery condition, which lasted over a period of several weeks next ensuing. At about 11 o'clock on the evening of January 25, plaintiff, unaccompanied, was going south on Lawndale avenue on the walk next to the school house. It had been snowing, and the walks were generally covered with a small layer of snow. This covering concealed the ice upon the sidewalk from the view of plaintiff. She stepped upon the snow-covered ice above mentioned, where she slipped, fell, and received the injuries complained of.

Plaintiff appears to have been in the exercise of due care and caution for her own safety at and immediately before the time of the accident. She was proceeding along her way near the center of the sidewalk, and, according to her uncontradicted testimony, it had been ‘nice walking.’ She had not seen anything to apprise her of the existence of the ice, and the first time she discovered it was after she had fallen and looked around, wondering how the accident had happened. A dedestrian upon a sidewalk may ordinarily assume that it is in a reasonably safe condition for travel. To hold a person absolutely bound to keep his eyes fixed upon a sidewalk in search of defects and dangerous places would be to establish a manifestly unreasonableand impracticable rule. City of Chicago v. Babcock, 143 Ill. 358, 32 N. E. 271.

It is claimed that the defendant city was not guilty of any negligence under the law in permitting the ice to remain on the sidewalk, that a city is under no obligation to remove ice from sidewalks in the wintertime, unless it had formed in ridges and hillocks, so as to be in the nature of an obstruction to pedestrians, and that it is immaterial whether the slipperiness was caused by natural or artificial means. What, if any, duty devolves upon a city to remove ice from its sidewalks is a subject of a great variety of opinions, and, because of this divergence of views, a number of different and contradictory statements of the law have been laid down in the various jurisdictions. However, there is one rule which is almost universal. That is, a city is not liable for injuries resulting from the general slipperiness of its streets and sidewalks due to the presence of ice and snow which have accumulated as a result of natural causes. 13 R. C. L. ‘Highways,’ 408; Spillane v. Fitchburg, 177 Mass. 87, 58 N. E. 176,83 Am. St. Rep. 262;Reedy v. St. Louis Brewing Ass'n, 161 Mo. 523, 61 S. W. 859,53 L. R. A. 805. A municipality is bound only to use reasonable care to keep its sidewalks reasonably safe for the amount and kind of travel which may fairly be expected upon them. Boender v. City of Harvey, 251 Ill. 228, 95 N. E. 1084. In view of the generality of ice and snow in the wintertime, the doctrine has become quite prevalent that it would be an unreasonable requirement to compel a municipality to remove them from walks and streets. In Chase v. Cleveland, 44 Ohio St. 505, 9 N. E. 225, 227,58 Am. Rep. 843, the court said: ‘It is not unreasonable to assume that there were hundreds of similar dangerous places in the city of Cleveland at the time of the accident to plaintiff. To effectually provide against dangers from this source would require a large special force, involving enormous expense.’ While this rule has assumed approximate universality, it has nevertheless been made subject to various exceptions. For example, it is sometimes said that it is immaterial whether the slipperiness was caused by natural or artificial means. 43 Corpus Juris, 1022; Nason v. Boston, 14 Allen (Mass.) 508;Henkes v. Minneapolis, 42 Minn. 530, 44 N. W. 1026. In other jurisdictions the exemption exists only where it was caused by natural means. 13 R. C. L. ‘Highways,’ 413; Evans v. Concordia, 74 Kan. 70, 85 P. 813,7 L. R. A. (N. S.) 933; Reedy v. St. Louis Brewing Ass'n, supra; Huston v. Council Bluffs, 101 Iowa, 33, 69 N. W. 1130,36 L. R. A. 211. Likewise, it has been held that a city is not liable if the ice was merely smooth and slippery (Evans v. Concordia, supra; Anthony v. Glens Falls, 4 App. Div. 218, 38 N. Y. S. 536;Cook v. Milwaukee, 24 Wis. 270, 1 Am. Rep. 183), yet liability may attach if it were in ridges or hillocks (Evans v. Concordia, supra; Luther v. City of Worcester, 97 Mass. 268;Jones v. City of Troy, 127 N. Y. 671, 28 N. E. 255).

The Appellate Courts of this state do not agree as to when a municipality is liable, and the Supreme Court cases cited by counsel are not in point. In City of Quincy v. Barker, 81 Ill. 300, 25 Am. Rep. 278, plaintiff received injuries through slipping upon a ridge of ice in the center of a sidewalk. He recovered a judgment in the trial court, but the judgmentwas reversed, not on the ground that a city is never liable for damages occasioned by slippery ice upon sidewalks, but because it appeared the ice was in the center of the walk, and there was ample space left on either side for plaintiff to have passed in the exercise of reasonable care....