You climb out the window onto the fire escape and the city opens up. The room behind you is four walls and a ceiling and a floor and the fire escape is none of those things. The fire escape is a metal platform bolted to the side of a building with a ladder going down and a ladder going up and the sky in every direction. The fire escape was designed for one purpose which is to get out. That is what the name says. Escape. The architects of the tenement did not plan for the fire escape. The fires planned for it. Enough people died in enough buildings that the city said you need a way out and the way out became a way of life.

Billie Holiday grew up at 762 Prospect Avenue in the Bronx and before she sang in any club she sang on the fire escape because the apartment was too small and too hot and the fire escape had air. The neighbors heard her before any audience did. The fire escape was her first stage and her first stage had no curtain and no microphone and no cover charge. Just a girl on a metal grate singing to the alley. The sound bounced off the opposite building and came back to her changed and that is what reverb is. The building gave her back her own voice with something added. The fire escape taught her what a room could do before she ever walked into a room that was built for singing.

West Side Story put Tony and Maria on a fire escape because the fire escape is where you go when the room is too small for what you are feeling. Romeo had a balcony. Tony had a fire escape. The balcony is architecture. The fire escape is survival equipment that someone turned into architecture by standing on it long enough. Bernstein and Sondheim understood that the fire escape is the most romantic structure in the city because the fire escape says I will risk the outside to see you. The fire escape is not comfortable. The metal is cold. The grate presses into your feet. The railing is rusted. None of that matters when the person you came out to see is standing on the one above you.

In the summer the fire escapes of New York become living rooms. People drag chairs out through the window and sit on the landing and smoke and talk and watch the street below. Children sleep on fire escape mattresses when the apartment is too hot to breathe in. Families eat dinner on the fire escape. Couples argue on the fire escape. Old men listen to the radio on the fire escape. The fire escape holds everything the apartment cannot contain. The overflow of living. The fire escape was never meant to be occupied. The fire escape was meant to be used once in an emergency and then forgotten. But the emergency in the tenement is every day. The emergency is the heat and the noise and the walls closing in and the fire escape is the only door that opens onto the sky.

You stand on the fire escape and you can see the other fire escapes and on every one of them someone is standing or sitting or sleeping or singing and the building becomes a vertical neighborhood. The front door of the building leads to the street but the fire escape leads to the air and the air belongs to everyone. The fire escape is the most democratic balcony ever built because the fire escape was not built for beauty. The fire escape was built for escape and the people who live on it turned it into something the architects never imagined. They turned survival into a porch.