City of Troy v. Watkins
City of Troy v. Watkins
Opinion of the Court
The bill is by an abutting property owner against the city of Troy, and seeks to enjoin the city or municipality from obstructing or .vacating a certain street, or a part of a certain street, of that city, whereon complainant’s property abuts. The bill therefore of necessity shows that complainant’s ingress and egress is by such'obstruction interfered with, and that consequent® he suffers injuries different in degree and kind from those of the public on account of the alleged nuisance. The bill was demurred to by the city for want of equity and of proper parties complainant. The trial court overruled the demurrers, and the city prosecutes this appeal.
The bill presents as clear and certain a case for relief by an abutting owner against a municipality for obstructing and wrongfully vacating a public street, as we find reported in the hooks, and there are many such reported cases. It not only shows an unauthorized vacation and abandonment by the municipality of one of its streets upon which abuts complainant’s property, but shows that it has without authority of law converted the part of the street so vacated into’another and different public use, viz. that as a public cemetery. The complain - ant is thus shown not only to be wrongfully deprived of tbe use of tbe street abutting Ms property as a way of ingress and egress, but to be injured in the fact that a public cemetery is thus without lawful authority put next to Ms property, being platted and sold as cemetery lots to the public and dead bodies being interred therein; and it is further shown that drastic ordinances have been passed to prevent the removal of such bodies from the street so abandoned and wrongfully converted to this use.
It is first insisted by tbe city that as complainant’s property is bounded on other sides by other streets his ingress and egress is not destroyed, and, consequently, that his injury is not different in kind from that of the public, with the result that he cannot maintain this hill.
It was held in Albes v. Southern Railway Co., 164 Ala. 356, 51 South. 327, and in 153 Ala. 523, 45 South. 234, that the complainant’s lot had to he abutting that portion of the street that was vacated to afford him basis to complain of the taking of property by virtue of the said vacation, and to invoke section 23 of the Constitution; but each opinion decided that, as there was a le *275 gally authorized vacation of the street, the said vacation was not a nuisance. A. G. S. R. Co. v. Barclay, 178 Ala. 128, 129, 59 South. 169.
“The question received consideration at our hands in the case of Douglass v. City Council of Montgomery, 118 Ala. 599, 24 South. 745, 43 L. R. A. 376, where it was held that municipal corporations hold title to streets, public squares, and parks, in trust for the public, and when lands have been dedicated for such purposes, the municipality has no power, unless specially authorized by the Legislature, to sell such lands for its own benefit, or to appropriate them for the use and benefit of private persons or corporations, or in any way divert them from the uses to which they were originally dedicated. Webb v. Demopolis, 95 Ala. 116, 13 South. 289, 21 L. R. A. 62; 2 Dillon on Munic. Corp. §§ 575, 650; 15 A. & E. Ency. Law (1st Ed.) 1064; 17 A. & E. Ency. Law (1st Ed.) 417.
“It is not pretended that the city council had any authority in its character [charter] to dispose of this street in the manner it did, or to abolish it, and under the authorities, its attempt to do so was unauthorized and void.”
Affirmed.
Reference
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- City of Troy v. Watkins.
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