Black v. Warehouse Investment Co.

RICHARDS, J.

This is an appeal from a judgment in defendant’s favor following an order granting defendant’s motion for a nonsuit.

The action was one for damages for personal injuries sustained by the plaintiff by falling into an unguarded elevator shaft in a building owned by the defendant. The facts upon which the plaintiff relied for his recovery, and upon which he predicates his claim for a reversal of said judgment, are substantially these: The defendant Warehouse Investment Company was, at and for some time prior to the injury complained of, the owner of a warehouse in San Francisco fronting on Townsend Street on the north, and extending to King Street, designated in the record herein as the “old” building. The said defendant was also at the time of the accident engaged in the erection of another warehouse building designated as the “new” building, adjacent to the former building but fronting on King Street and extending back to a private alley, also owned by the defendant, and which ran through, and under the second floor of, the old warehouse building. The general brick and steel work of the new building was being done under a contract with Anderson & Rainey, but from the operation of this contract had been specially excepted the erection of two large steel beams or girders for a railroad track entering the building in the outside wall on King Street. On the morning of June 14, 1913, the work of construction in that part of the building had so far progressed that it was ready for the placing of these beams, which were at the time in the possession of the Overland Freight Transfer Company, whose duty it was to transport them to the place of their erection when notified so to do. On the evening of June 13; 1913, a Mr. Qualters, an employee of the Overland Freight Transfer Company, met a Mr. Johnson, representing the California Erecting Company, and arranged with him to put the beams in place on the following morning. The plaintiff herein was an employee of Johnson or of his company, and was with him at the time of this interview with Qualters, who then gave Johnson a card bearing the telephone number of a stable, to which the latter

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was to telephone when all was in readiness for the hauling of the beams to their place of erection. Qualters, at the time, stated that he would have to take up the matter of the agreement with Johnson for the erection of the beams with a Mr. Tilden, who, he said, was the boss at the building, for the latter’s approval. On the following morning Johnson, Qualters, and Tilden met at the building, and the agreement being approved by the latter, Johnson, the plaintiff, and others went ahead with the work of preparation for putting the beams in position, and while such work was in progress Tilden informed Johnson that, “We got a telephone in there, and you can go and use that phone, and phone to the barn when you are ready for the beams, ’ ’ at the same time pointing out to him where the office in the old building in which such telephone was situated was to be found. When all was ready Johnson told the plaintiff Black to go to the indicated telephone and send the message to the barn for the delivery of the beams. It was while Black was undertaking to fulfill this mission that he fell into the unguarded elevator shaft in the old building and sustained the injuries which form the basis of this action. This elevator shaft lay in the line of a driveway, on the ground floor of the old building, which could be entered by way of the alley-way which ran along the north end of the new building and intersected said driveway. It was along the most direct way to the office of the old building in which was the telephone to which the plaintiff had been directed to go, and it was while going along this route that the plaintiff fell into the unguarded shaft of said elevator.