King v. Davenport

Citations

• 98 Ill. 305
• 1881 Ill. LEXIS 258

Syllabus

<p>1. Police regulations in cities—power to prevent the erection and repair of buildings of combustible materials. ■ The delegation of legislative power to a city to prohibit the erection, placing or repairing of wooden buildings within limits prescribed by ordinance, without permission, and to direct and prescribe that all buildings within the limits prescribed shall be made or constructed of fire proof materials, and generally to define and declare what shall be nuisances, and to authorize and direct the summary abatement thereof, etc., is within the competency of legislative power, and authorizes the passage of an ordinance prohibiting the erection, or repairing of any building within the fire limits, with combustible materials, and providing for the summary abatement or removal of the same.</p> <p>2. Same—what may be interdicted in populous towns or cities. TJnwholesome trades, slaughter houses, operations offensive to the senses, the deposit of powder, the application of steam power to propel cars, the buildin» with combustible materials, and the burial of the dead, may be prohibited in the midst of dense masses of population, on the general principle that every person ought so to use his property as not to injure his neighbor, and that private rights must be subservient to the general interests of the community.</p> <p>3. An ordinance of a city passed in pursuance of legislative authority, establishing fire limits, and declaring a wooden roof put on a building thereafter within the fire limits, to be a nuisance, and requiring the city marshal, under an order from the mayor, to remove the same, is a reasonable exercise of the police power of the Stqte, and has the force and effect of a statute, when set up in justification by the marshal in removing such a roof.</p> <p>4. Same—summary abatement without previous trial by jury. As the summary abatement of nuisances is a remedy which has ever existed in the law, its exercise can not be regarded as in conflict with