Wallfare (February/March 1996 | Volume: 47, Issue: 1)

Wallfare

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Authors: William B. Meyer

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

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February/March 1996 | Volume 47, Issue 1

A rich variety of fences is one of the many charms of the American landscape: the wooden rail fence of the rural Midwest and South and the picket fence of the town, crude barbed wire surrounding prairie fields and ornate iron palings protecting village lawns, the New England stone wall running through abandoned farmland grown back to forest and the chain-link barrier screening weed-infested lots in the downtown fringe. Another classic American type is defined not by form but by function. Yet because its form follows its function with a rigor that Louis Sullivan would have admired, it is as easy as the others to recognize. Its purpose is summed up in its name: the spite fence. It is meant to irritate and to harm, blocking the light and air and obstructing the view from the windows of a neighboring house, making that property’s occupation less pleasant and its rental or resale less lucrative. A spite fence presses as close to its target building as property boundaries will allow, ideally fitting roof-high against it as snugly as the side of a packing crate. It is a bad fence made by a bad neighbor, an iron (or wooden, or steel, or concrete) curtain drawn across the front line of a local cold war.

 

Though easily spotted, a spite fence today is rarely seen. If familiar fence types are as common as oaks and maples, as sparrows and robins, it is one of those rare species that one is likely to know only from books and can hardly ever hope to encounter in the field. Spite fences were never ubiquitous elements of the American scene, but there was a time when they were not so scarce. As recently as 1921 New York City alone numbered them in the hundreds. If they have gone from such modest abundance to near extinction today, it is in part because the law has been enlisted against them. Boundary features in the landscape, they long pressed up against a legal boundary as well, the one separating malicious activities that the law tolerates from those it forbids. A century’s resurveying of that line has put them clearly on the latter side.

What remains a widespread, though outdated, bit of folk legal doctrine was indeed the law of the land as late as the Civil War: That whatever I choose to build on my property is my own damn business and nobody else’s, even if harming others is my sole reason for building it. A pioneering Connecticut statute of 1867 banning spite structures of any kind was the first exception. By the late 1880s change was under way. Several more New England legislatures declared unnecessarily high fences built solely to annoy neighbors abatable nuisances. A second weapon took shape at the same time: In 1888 Michigan’s highest court in the case of Burke v. Smith upheld the claim that such fences were nuisances according to the common law