The fire escape ladder was the balcony of the tenement. Nobody used it for fires. Everybody used it for everything else. The fire escape was the porch and the garden and the bedroom on hot nights and the place where you smoked when your mother said no smoking in the house. The fire escape was the most versatile piece of architecture ever bolted to a building.

The fire escape had a drop ladder at the bottom. You kicked it and it swung down and you climbed to the ground. That was the exit plan. But the drop ladder was also the entrance plan. Every kid in the neighborhood knew how to jump up and grab the drop ladder and swing it down and climb up to the second floor. The fire escape was the first parkour. We did not call it parkour. We called it going up.

I slept on the fire escape on East Seventh Street on nights when the apartment was a hundred degrees and the fire escape was ninety-five. Five degrees of relief. That was enough. You brought a pillow and a sheet and you lay on the iron grate and the grate left a pattern on your back and in the morning you looked like you had been pressed by a waffle iron. The fire escape was not comfortable. But it was outside and outside was cooler and cooler was everything.

The fire escape told you who was fighting. The couple on the fourth floor went to the fire escape to argue because the apartment was too small for the argument. The fire escape gave the argument room. The whole block heard it. The fire escape was a stage for domestic theater. The audience did not buy tickets. The audience lived across the airshaft.

The fire escapes are decorative now. The new buildings have them because the code says so but nobody stands on them. Nobody sleeps on them. Nobody fights on them. The fire escape is a sculpture attached to a building. It looks like it belongs to a city that no longer exists. The fire escape remembers when people used their buildings instead of just living in them.

See also: Tar Beach, Tenement Window