150 SHADE-TREES IN TOWNS AND CITIES 



under which our increasingly dense population is to live and 

 flourish. Its beauty and sightliness have value in the land- 

 scape. Its shade refreshes and shelters; and even as an 

 investment, young trees have an actual money value which 

 cannot be disregarded or measured by their present value 

 as timber trees. " 



Another decision of far-reaching importance to telephone 

 and telegraph companies and other companies maintaining 

 lines of poles and wires in public highways, and to owners 

 of property along such highways, was rendered November 

 17, 1904, by Supreme Court Justice Garretson, in Long 

 Island City. . 



It was the case of Mary I. Weeks, a resident of Bayside, 

 Long Island, against the New York and New Jersey Tele- 

 phone Company. The company erected a line of telephone 

 poles on a public highway running through her property, and 

 strung wires thereon. The justice held that the use of the 

 highway for the support of a line of poles and wires for sup- 

 plying the general public with electricity was in no sense a 

 proper street use, and that therefore, notwithstanding the 

 statute and the city permits, the erection and maintenance 

 of that line of poles and wires for that purpose without Mrs. 

 Weeks's consent, was unauthorized and illegal. He directed 

 the sheriff to remove its poles and wires from the street. 



STREET IMPROVEMENTS 



Many trees necessarily fall a sacrifice to important 

 improvements in the natural growth of cities. When large 

 buildings are erected on business streets, close to the side- 

 walk, it is inevitable that they must go. Trees also suffer 

 from the mutilation of the needed cutting of large roots in 

 resetting curbstones and flag walks; also in the digging for 



