You probably never realized that Marc Cohn’s great song, Walking in Memphis, was actually giving sound personal injury-avoidance advice with the line “walking with my feet ten feet off of Beale.”
It applies to sidewalks as well.
Most tortious property conditions are the result of negligent maintenance or oversight. But sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes you have to go out of your way to create a tortious condition. In other words, spotting the tort doesn’t always cut it. If you build it, they will fall.
On this busy sidewalk on Union Avenue in front of a Fresh Market, someone, presumably someone official, inexplicably installed this bolted-down, six-inch steel pole right in the middle of the sidewalk.