The simplest solution was to find a way to get people out through their windows. Landlords didn’t want to add a set of fire-resistant interior stairs, because such a structure would reduce the amount of rentable space. The first rules were imposed in the early 1860s when the New York City Department of Buildings ordered the implementation of an additional form of egress on tenements with more than eight families above the first floor. The population of New York doubled each decade from 1800 to 1880, and the scale of the challenges the city was facing was both monumental and unique. Deadly fires ripped through the tenements in the poorest and most underserved neighborhoods, wreaking havoc and taxing city resources. The body count spurred the creation of building codes. “It must have been instant death for any of the poor creatures on the upper floors to have jumped from the roof.” Thirty people died in the blaze. “The burning building extended four stories above any of the surrounding structures,” The New York Times wrote of the bakery fire. That is, before the building collapsed, or they were killed by the flames. Those who were trapped had only one option: to wait, hoping the overtaxed fire departments would turn up swiftly and with a ladder tall enough to reach the upper-floor windows. The stairs sometimes burned away, as they did in an 1860 fire that started in a building’s basement, where dry hay and shavings from a bakery’s storeroom had ignited. When fires raged, there were typically only two forms of escape: narrow interior stairs, or the roof. They grew more deadly the higher they climbed. These buildings were firetraps, made of cheap materials that burned easily. Cheaply built tenements stretched higher into the air than ever before, filled with people who worked in equally overfilled factories. And despite having been invented expressly for public safety, the fire escape always created as much danger as it replaced.īy the mid-19th century, New York City was overcrowded, oppressively loud, and unequipped to support the flood of new arrivals to the industrializing city. It continues to impact the urban landscape today, in ways that few could have imagined when they were first thought up. Part emergency exit, part makeshift patio, the fire escape has played an integral role in shaping the development of the cities whose buildings bear them. They serve purposes as numerous as their pop-cultural cameos. Fire escapes, the clunky metal accessories to buildings constructed in response to industrial building-code reform, have become an iconic part of the urban landscape.
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