## Facts

- Helen G. Anjou was a passenger at the Boston Elevated Railway Company’s Dudley Street terminal station in Boston.
- After leaving a car on the upper platform and waiting for a crowd to clear, she asked a uniformed employee for directions to another car.
- The employee walked ahead along a narrow platform toward a stairway; Anjou followed a few feet behind him.
- Anjou slipped on a banana peel on the platform and fell, suffering personal injuries.
- Witnesses described the banana peel as dry and gritty, appearing dirt-covered and trampled, flattened, and entirely black with no yellow showing.
- There was evidence that station employees, including one present at the station continuously, had a duty to observe and remove items on the platform that could interfere with passenger safety.

## Issues

1. Whether the condition of the banana peel and the defendant’s inspection/cleanup duties provided sufficient evidence for a jury to find negligence based on constructive notice.
2. Whether the trial court erred by directing a verdict for the defendant instead of submitting negligence to the jury.

## Decision

- The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court sustained the plaintiff’s exceptions to the directed verdict.
- The court held the evidence permitted a jury to infer the banana peel had been on the platform long enough that employees, using reasonable care, should have discovered and removed it.
- The court concluded the negligence question was for the jury, not for resolution by directed verdict.
- Judgment entered for the plaintiff in the amount of $1,250 plus costs.

## Legal Principles

- A common carrier or station operator must use reasonable care to keep station platforms reasonably safe for passengers.
- Reasonable care includes reasonable inspection and removal of hazards where employees are assigned to observe and address unsafe conditions.
- Constructive notice may be inferred from circumstantial evidence, including the worn, dirty, flattened condition of a foreign substance suggesting it remained long enough to be discovered by reasonable inspection.
- When competing inferences about duration and discoverability of a hazard are reasonable, negligence is a fact question for the jury rather than the court on a directed verdict.

## Conclusion

Because the banana peel’s dirty, flattened, and blackened condition supported an inference that it had been present for a substantial time and should have been discovered and removed by employees, the case required jury determination of negligence, and the directed verdict for the defendant was improper.


Anjou v. Bos. Elevated Ry. Co., 208 Mass. 273, 94 N.E. 386 (1911)