Somerville institution rumored to be closing...

[wine-fun101.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen any other posts on this, so I figured it was worth sharing for all of those Soundbites lovers out there... The breakfast institution Soundbites will close (Feb. 15) - due to a lack of fire exit.

Comments

[wine-fun101.livejournal.com]

Apparently the feud between Ball Sq Cafe/Victor's and Soundbites has come to a head. Soundbites used to have a back exit via his neighbors.... Recently they blocked the exit, so now Soundbites customers/staff no longer have a back way out. I'm assuming it is a permanent as no alternate solution has been accepted, but who knows!

[mrboboto.livejournal.com]

That whole feud is so childish on both sides. I wish they would both grow up already.

[ron_newman]

Isn't there a principle in law called "adverse easement", or something like that -- if property owner A has informally allowed owner B to use his property for some period of time, he can't just suddenly revoke the access. And especially in this case if the access is legally required to comply with a building or fire code?

[mrboboto.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this whole thing seems pretty fishy to me. I'll wait and see an actual news story about it.

[nathanjw]

"adverse possession". I doubt it would apply here; the timescales are typically many years, and short of that they *can* just revoke access. Also, is the neighbor who revoked access the building owner? If not, then it isn't even the right concept for a dispute between two commercial tenants.

[nathanjw]

"if the access is legally required to comply with a building or fire code" is where it gets interesting, though. It's not hard to believe that a commercial tenant has an expectation of and possibly a contractual right to the necessary building facilities for the agreed-upon business, but this is going to depend on the details of the lease and other contracts.

[ron_newman]

Let's say I build a fire escape that dumps out at the property line, and the neighbor years later builds a wall or fence on the line that blocks my fire escape ... doesn't seem like that should be legal.

[nathanjw]

This is where we'd have to ask some actual lawyers (and building inspectors, etc.), but my suspicion is that you'd be required by code to build your fire escape to only use pathways that were on your property or to which you already had easements, in order to prevent exactly this situation. That is, there is a general principle of preventing the creation of these dependencies on the continued good will of your neighbors, rather than letting your actions restrict the future use of their property.