Connolly v. Nicollet Hotel

A business that assembles a large crowd on its premises for its own financial benefit must use reasonable care to protect others from harms that may reasonably be anticipated. That responsibility can require adequate guards, attendants, or other precautions to control a crowd whose conduct poses a foreseeable danger.

Foreseeability defines the scope of duty. The hotel did not need advance knowledge of the precise object that would be thrown, the precise room involved, or the exact manner of injury. It was enough that an ordinarily prudent operator could foresee a risk that disorderly guests might injure people below.

The duty extended to Connolly although she was using a public sidewalk rather than the hotel itself. A pedestrian lawfully using the sidewalk beside a hotel may expect the hotel to exercise reasonable care so that conduct permitted on its property does not expose passersby to bodily harm.

The convention brought more than 4,000 young men to a hotel where alcohol was freely available, and the hotel had turned substantial portions of its facilities over to convention-related social activity. The Court concluded that these circumstances, viewed with ordinary human experience, could support an inference that heightened disorder and its attendant risks were foreseeable.

Before Connolly's injury, management had received reports that water bags, ice cubes, bottles, and other objects had been thrown or dropped from the hotel. It also knew of broken screens, extensive property damage, debris, and disorder throughout the building. The hotel had even altered laundry bags before the convention by cutting their corners, apparently to prevent their use as water containers. This evidence allowed a jury to find that objects being thrown toward the street were within the hotel's range of apprehension.

Once management learned that its initial efforts had not controlled the convention, it had a duty to consider further reasonable measures. A jury could find negligence in the hotel's failure to hire more guards, obtain additional police protection, or ask responsible convention officers to discipline or control participants. The Court did not prescribe a specific required precaution; it held that the adequacy of the hotel's response was for the jury under these unusual circumstances.

The hotel could not avoid a jury trial merely because it had not identified the particular guest or room responsible before Connolly was hurt. Like the hotel in Gore v. Whitmore Hotel Co., it had authority to investigate and, if warranted, remove disorderly guests. Whether reasonable efforts could have identified or controlled the offenders in time was a factual question rather than one to be resolved against Connolly as a matter of law.

Connolly was struck by a mass of moist dirt while walking directly beside the hotel, and witnesses saw it fall from above. The hotel's height, its proximity to the sidewalk, and the absence of comparable nearby structures made the hotel a reasonable source of the object.

The evidence also supported rejecting merely speculative alternatives. There was no unusual weather or wind, no evidence that the material came from a vehicle or another pedestrian, and evidence indicated that the hotel exterior was periodically inspected so that a large natural accumulation of dirt was unlikely to have fallen from the building. Circumstantial evidence need not eliminate every imaginable possibility; it need only move the conclusion from conjecture to a legitimate inference for the jury.