Some people say no to money. Far fewer say no to a railroad millionaire, and fewer still keep saying it while a wall rises outside their windows. On San Francisco's Nob Hill, an undertaker named Nicholas Yung did exactly that. His small house became the centre of a well-known property dispute after he refused to sell to Charles Crocker, who responded by building a 40-foot fence around three sides of the property, as Arnold Woods recounts in his Western Neighborhoods Project article. Putting the undertaker's stand beside a much more recent one in Seattle shows what changed, what did not, and why the law had so little to say about it.
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