Balcony Seats to the City

Even in quickly evolving New York City, there’s something romantic about slowing down, stepping out of the fast currents of foot traffic, and looking up. Few neighborhoods will disappoint. Look up high, especially in Manhattan, and you can see the built history of the big city play out in the architectural details and ornamental facades of buildings, awnings and balconies standing out like grooves in record, ready to reveal the story of each block. Within the skyscraper canyons of Midtown, you can spot the pinnacles of great towers, and the cranes of greater towers in the making. But look a little lower, around the corners and in the alleyways, and you’ll see a structure with a romantic connection to an older New York City, zig-zagging down towards the streets.

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Fire escapes have a fairly straightforward purpose, designed for the noble role their name implies. But for much of their history, in cities across the world, they’ve served altogether different roles. Tenement dwellers slept on them, bickered on them, turned them into literal community grapevines. For the optimistic and dirt-poor trying to eke out an existence in a dense city, the iron grates offered a blank canvas to conjure unaffordable luxuries; a mattress became an extra bedroom, especially before the comforts of air conditioning ("whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear," wrote playwright Arthur Miller about growing up on 110th Street); a flower pot was as good as a garden, and the stairs offered an easy way to the roof, "tar beach" during hot summer days. "The greatest thing I remember about wintertime," Chicagoan Bill Bailey once told Studs Terkel, "you’d reach out on the fire escape and pull in some snow, put condensed milk on it, and you had great ice cream!"

A newly arrived immigrant eats noodles on the fire escape in New York City. © Chien-Chi Chang/Magnum Photos 1988

"They hearken back to a time when the barriers between your and your neighbor’s lives and physical space were much more tenuous than now," says Andrew Berman, Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, who’s spent his whole adult life in a pair of Hell’s Kitchen buildings with fire escapes. "This was an era when people had communal bathrooms and lots more shared space. It was time when there was an expectation, at least for many of us of modest means, that our lives would be much more intertwined and interdependent."

For many, fire escapes exist somewhere between the practical and the aesthetic. And while everyday citizens made them part of their homes, artists and intellectuals made fire escapes romantic symbols. Photos and films have caused fire escapes to be intertwined with urbanity, as attached to our collective imagination of cities as they are to the sides of buildings. 

Consider how fire escapes make it into the foreground and background of the New York City’s creative culture: surreal, black-and-white symbols of alienation in film noir, the modern balcony in West Side Story’s interracial spin on Shakespeare, the workplaces of crime fighters and comic book heroes, framing devices for Hitchcock’s exploration of voyeurism, Rear Window.

Rear Window; James Stewart, Grace Kelly, 1954. Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection