Edith Macefield’s house. Image credits: Wikimedia Commons
Woods writes that after Yung died in 1880, his heirs later sold the property and the house and fence were torn down. Other accounts say Yung’s widow, Rosina, held on until she died in 1902 and that their daughters sold the lot to the Crocker family in 1904. After the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed the Nob Hill mansions, the Crocker family donated their plot to the Episcopal Diocese, which had lost its Grace Cathedral in the catastrophe as well. The cornerstone of Grace Cathedral was laid on January 24, 1910. Construction of the present cathedral began in the late 1920s and proceeded in stages before the completed building was consecrated on November 20, 1964.
Crocker therefore built a 40-foot fence around three sides of Yung’s property, and a footnote in Woods’s article traces the account to a San Francisco Chronicle article dated July 27, 1878. Crocker owned a vast area, but he wanted the whole block, and Yung refused to sell.
A neighbor like Yung had few legal options, and the American Planning Association’s August 1958 report, Fences, explains why. The English doctrine of ancient lights did not apply in the United States, a position American courts had taken long before 1958, as in the New York Supreme Court’s 1838 decision in Parker v. In the 1880 Connecticut case Gallagher v. In the 1956 Ohio case State v.
Because courts were reluctant to treat spite fences as private nuisances, several states, including Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Washington, New York and Kentucky, passed statutes allowing suits over them. Because the provision lacked uniform standards for what was prohibited, zumpano, a court struck down a Norton Township zoning provision that prohibited unnecessary structures, including fences, whose apparent purpose was to annoy or damage an adjacent owner,. Dodge, the motive test was introduced: a fence or building could be considered spiteful if a person of ordinary judgment viewed it that way.
At common law, an owner was entitled to make reasonable use of his land, and obstructing a neighbor’s light, air, or view was no ground for a lawsuit. Foote. The same report noted that the New York act set a fence height limit of ten feet. Cities that tried to ban such fences through zoning struggled. The report concludes that a city’s only direct control over spite fences is height.
