## Facts

- A recorded 1925 subdivision plan depicted Yeates Street and East Union Street as streets dedicated to public use, but the municipality never accepted or opened them.
- Andrew and Michael Estojak owned and operated an auto body business on lots within the subdivision and later acquired additional nearby lots.
- To create access between their business property and the newly acquired lots, the Estojaks bulldozed and graded a roadway over the unopened portion of East Union Street.
- Neighboring residential owners (including the Mazsas and the Johnsons) had, for decades, treated the unopened strip abutting their properties as yard space by mowing, gardening, planting trees, and constructing a driveway.
- The neighboring owners generally did not fence or otherwise bar passage until after the Estojaks constructed the roadway, at which point they erected a fence to prevent use.
- The parties stipulated that fee title to the bed of the unopened street had reverted to abutting owners, but disputed whether private access rights shown on the plan remained.
- The neighboring owners argued their long-term use, together with a natural embankment near Jennings Street, established adverse possession that extinguished any easement.

## Issues

1. Whether a lot owner’s private easement of ingress and egress over streets shown on a recorded subdivision plan survives reversion of the fee in an unopened street to abutting owners.
2. Whether the abutting owners’ long-term residential yard use and later fencing extinguished the lot owners’ easement by adverse possession.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reversed the judgment for the defendants.
- The Court held that the Estojaks possessed a private easement of ingress and egress over East Union Street arising from the recorded plan.
- The Court held the easement was not extinguished by adverse possession because the defendants’ conduct did not constitute actual, continuous, exclusive, visible, notorious, and hostile obstruction of the easement for the prescriptive period.
- The post-roadway fence could not supply the required period of adverse, exclusionary conduct, and the natural embankment did not establish hostile possession against the easement.

## Legal Principles

- Sale of lots with reference to a recorded subdivision plan showing streets creates private easements in lot owners to use those streets for access, independent of municipal acceptance or opening.
- Reversion of fee title in an unopened platted street to abutting owners does not eliminate private easements created by the plan; the reverted fee remains burdened by those easements unless properly extinguished.
- An easement may be extinguished by adverse possession only upon proof of possession and use that is actual, continuous, exclusive, visible, notorious, and hostile to the easement for the statutory period.
- Ordinary yard-type use of the servient land (mowing, gardening, landscaping, similar residential use), without long-standing, unequivocal acts excluding passage, is generally consistent with ownership subject to an easement and does not alone repudiate the easement.
- Nonuse by the easement holder does not, by itself, terminate an easement created by recorded plan.

## Conclusion

The court held that private access rights created by a recorded subdivision plan persist even when the municipality never opens the streets and fee title reverts to abutting owners, and that the neighbors’ longstanding yard use and later fencing did not meet the strict requirements to extinguish the Estojaks’ ingress-and-egress easement by adverse possession.


Estojak v. Mazsa, 562 A.2d 271 (Pa. 1989)