Oak Lane Corporation v. Duke

Marbury, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court. Appellees filed a bill of complaint in the Circuit Court of Baltimore City against the appellant to compel specific performance of a contract of sale in which the appellant was the purchaser. The lots sold were numbers 19, 26, 27, 29, 30 and 31, (all on Oakford Avenue) and numbers 159 and 160 (on Coldspring Lane), in Park Manor, in Baltimore City. Specific performance was resisted, on the ground that there are certain restrictions upon the lots and that the tax sales of certain of them were defective.

The Chancellor decreed in favor of complainants, whereupon appellant came here. The lots are a part of a large tract subdivided as Park Manor. It was owned by the Park Manor Realty Company, and in each deed conveyed by that Company to their grantees there were included restrictions against the use of land for the manufacturing, brewing or sale of spirituous or malt liquor, or as a tavern or drinking saloon, bone boiling establishment, tannery, slaughter ¹³⁹ house, glue, soap, starch or gun powder manufacturing, or for other offensive or dangerous purposes, or for the keeping of pigs, or other animals of like offensive character. The building lines were to be fifteen feet back from the street, and no part of any building was to be erected less than ten feet from the building line.

No out-buildings were to be erected nearer to the main road than seventy-five feet. No house costing less than $1,500 to $2,500, should be erected on a lot, and only one house on a fifty-foot frontage. None of the deeds contains any statement that similar restrictions bind the lots retained, or subsequently to be sold by the Park Manor Company. The appellant desires to construct apartment units and contends that it cannot do this because of these restrictions, particularly those with respect to the building lines and the construction of only one house to a fifty-foot frontage.

Where restrictions are imposed upon property sold for the benefit of the property retained, and upon the property retained for the benefit of the property sold, or upon both for the benefit of both, such restrictions are held to constitute a uniform general scheme or plan of development, to run with the land, and to be valid and enforceable. McKendrick v. Savings Bank, 174 Md. 118 , 197 A. 580 . Such restrictions may be shown otherwise than by the deeds, if there is clear and satisfactory proof that the common grantor intended that they should affect the land retained. This is a question of fact which may be considered from all the evidence produced in the case.

Any doubt should be resolved in favor of the unrestricted use of the property. Scholtes v. McColgan, 184 Md. 480 , 41 A. 2d 479 . There is nothing in the case before us which indicates any common scheme, except the restrictions in the deeds of the lots sold. The Park Manor Realty Company did not obligate itself to convey all of the lots in the plat with these restrictions on them when it acquired the property in 1907, and subdivided it, and started to sell lots.

In the nearly 50 years that have since elapsed, ¹⁴⁰ there have been a number of violations of these restric-. tions by subsequent owners of the