The fire escape was the balcony of the poor. The rich had terraces. The poor had fire escapes. A grid of iron bolted to the side of a building and on that grid the entire life of the tenement happened. Smoking. Arguing. Kissing. Singing. A kid with a transistor radio on a fire escape on the Lower East Side in nineteen sixty-five listening to the Beatles and learning the chords on a guitar his mother bought at a pawnshop. The fire escape was the conservatory of street rock.

West Side Story put the fire escape on Broadway. Maria and Tony singing on fire escapes and the whole audience understood that the fire escape was not architecture. The fire escape was privacy. The only privacy the tenement offered. Your room had six people in it. The hallway had twelve. The stoop had the whole block. But the fire escape was yours. Three feet of iron between you and the city and on those three feet you could think.

I practiced guitar on a fire escape on East Fifth Street. Summer of sixty-seven. My neighbors could hear every chord I learned and every chord I did not learn. A woman three floors up yelled shut up and a man two floors down yelled keep playing and I kept playing because in any democracy the vote to keep playing wins. The fire escape was an audience that could not leave. They were captive. Like the subway. Like the corner at rush hour. The best audiences are the ones who did not choose to be there.

The fire escape is illegal now. Not the structure. The sitting. The city says you cannot use a fire escape for anything except escaping a fire. The city has made it illegal to sit on your own building and look at the sky. The city has made it illegal to smoke a cigarette three stories above the sidewalk. The city has made it illegal to be a human being on a piece of iron that was built for human beings. The fire escape was designed to save your life and the city will fine you for living on it.

The new buildings do not have fire escapes. They have internal stairwells. Safer. More efficient. Uglier. The fire escape gave the building a face. The fire escape was the building's expression. A building with fire escapes looks like it has stories to tell. A building without fire escapes looks like it has something to hide. I miss the fire escapes. I miss the sound of a guitar coming from three floors up on a summer night. I miss the democracy of iron.