Ross v. Belzer

¹⁸⁹ Marbury, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court. This is a suit brought in the Superior Court of Baltimore City by the appellee, who was a tenant in an apartment house at 4003 Bonner Road in Baltimore City, owned by the appellant. The suit is for damages for an accident happening on the common steps leading from the outside door of the apartment house to the first floor where the appellee’s apartment was located. This accident happened between 11 and 11:30 P. M. on August 3, 1950, when the appellee was returning to her apartment.

She caught her foot on or under the rubber matting which was on these steps, and fell backward, breaking her hip. She claims that her landlord was negligent in two respects, namely, that the matting was either not in proper condition, or not properly fastened, and that the visibility of the bottom step was very bad. At the conclusion of the case, the appellant made a motion for a directed verdict on the ground of lack of legally sufficient evidence of primary negligence, and on the ground that as a matter of law the appellee was guilty of negligence directly contributing to the accident. These motions were refused, and the case went to the jury, which returned a verdict in favor of the plaintiff.

Thereupon the appellant filed a motion for a judgment N.O.V. This was overruled and judgment entered on the verdict, from which the appeal was taken here. In Sezzin v. Stark, 187 Md. 241, 250 , 49 A. 2d 742, 746 , we approved the statement in Restatement of Torts, Negligence, Sec. 360, “Parts of Land Retained in Lessor’s Control Which Lessee is Entitled to Use”, to the effect that a lessor is subject to liability to his lessee and others lawfully upon the land with the consent of the lessee or a sub-lessee for bodily harm caused to them by a dangerous condition upon that part of the land retained in the lessor’s control, if the lessor by the exercise of reasonable care could have discovered the condition and the unreasonable risk involved therein and could have made the condition safe. We also quoted in that case ¹⁹⁰ from some New Jersey cases to the effect that this departure from the general rule “has been necessitated by the construction of tenement or apartment houses, intended for the habitation of many tenants,” and “* * * the courts have found it necessary to recognize the novel housing requisite incident to modern life, by treating hallways and stairs as common ways or appurtenances * * * for a failure to reasonably maintain which, in the event of damage to occupants and others lawfully using the premises, the landlord has by the general trend of authority been made liable.” The samé question is fully discussed and the same conclusion reached by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in the case of State, Use of Pumphrey v. Manor Real Estate & Trust Co., 176 F. 2d 414, 417 . This case involved an apartment house in Baltimore, and the Maryland law was applied in an opinion written by Judge Soper, a distinguished Maryland lawyer and state judge before he went upon the Federal bench.

In that case, the court noted that under the law of Maryland, the general docT trine is that there is no implied covenant requiring the landlord to make repairs, and no implied warranty that a house shall be fit for habitation, but the landlord’s obligation is different in the case of multiple unit dwellings, “for” (quoting from a Maryland case) “where he leases separate portions of the same building to different tenants, and reserves under his control the halls, stairways, and other portions of the building used in common by all of the tenants as means of access to their respective rooms or apartments, he is under an obligation to use reasonable diligence to keep the portions so retained under his control of the building in a safe condition and free from improper obstructions.” Whitman v. Mason, 102 Md. 275, 282 , 62 A. 749, 751 , 4 L. R. A., N. S., 565. It is the general rule that the particular condition which caused the injury must have been made known to the property owner a reasonable time before the accident occurred so that he might have an opportunity to ¹⁹¹ correct it. This is illustrated by a number of cases. In Thompson v. Clemens, 96 Md. 196 , 53 A. 919 , 60 L. R. A. 580, the plaintiff was injured by falling through a porch where some boards at the south end had given way.

The only notice the landlord had was that some boards at the north end of the porch were bulging. This was held legally insufficient to establish negligence on the part of the landlord. In Robinson v. Heil, 128 Md. 645 , 98 A. 195 , the condition of steps had been previously called to the attention of the landlord, and he had promised to repair them. These steps collapsed and caused the injury, and the evidence was held sufficient to go to the jury.

In King v. Compton, 187 Md. 363 , 50 A. 2d 131 , the landlord had been notified of a defect in a platform which gave access to the entrance door. The accident occurred, however, because of a hidden defect in the ramp, and not by the disclosed defect in the platform, and we held that there was not sufficient evidence to take the case to the jury. The plaintiff-appellee in this case testified: “And the light