236 Mass. 170 | Mass. | 1920
The defendant was owner of a two-family tenement house, the approach to which consisted of a flight of outside steps and a piazza leading to the front door. On December 12, 1916, the plaintiff came to the house on the express invitation of the upstairs tenant, Fred Grandmont; and “there was evidence that she was injured by reason of breaking through a board of the piazza with her left foot as she stepped on to the piazza to enter the house.” The board did not break into separate pieces, but the end on which she stepped went down, and “she became fast, just below the knee, in the hole, where the board gave way.” The trial judge ordered a verdict for the defendant.
The controlling question presented is whether there was sufficient evidence to entitle the plaintiff to go to the jury on the issue of the defendant’s negligence. The piazza upon which the plaintiff was injured was used in common by the tenants, and remained in the control of the defendant landlord. His duty to the tenant Grandmont, and concededly to the plaintiff as the tenant’s invitee, was “that of due care to keep it in such condition as it was in, or purported to be in, at the time of the letting,” which was in May, 1916. Quinn v. Perham, 151 Mass. 162, 163. This phrase was defined in Andrews v. Williamson, 193 Mass. 92, 94, as meaning “such condition as it would appear to be to a person of ordinary observation, and has reference to the obvious condition of things existing at the time of the letting.” And, as the court adds (page 95), “if the defect of which the plaintiffs complain was obvious at the time of the letting, then the defendant was not liable.”
Exceptions overruled.