EscapeRail

September 13, 2002 5:40 PM

EscapeRail finds beauty on every block - a photographic study of fire escapes.
posted by momorgan (9 comments total)

Beautiful - if too close. Or because of it. Am I the only one to associate fire escapes with the music of George Gershwin?
posted by MiguelCardoso at 5:57 PM on September 13, 2002

Beautiful - if too close. Or because of it.

Beautiful because they're close IMO. Nice photos, but I want more! I've always had a fascination with the rusty remnants of the past. These particular photos (and fire escapes in general) remind me of old Hitchcock movies, broken fingernails, and peanut butter. Hmmmm...
posted by poopy at 6:10 PM on September 13, 2002

Gorgeous. Upon googling, I found lots of sites with one or two nice fire escape photos each (and a bunch of home fire safety advice and accounts of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire). Here are the search results; it's not worth posting them individually. And a poem that goes nicely with them.
posted by hippugeek at 6:32 PM on September 13, 2002

I googled for some old building photos and came up with this. Some of the pictures on this site are in areas I spent a good/bad span of my life in. The Franklin County Poorhouse is only a few miles away from where my older sister currently lives.
posted by poopy at 6:48 PM on September 13, 2002

I live in Nova Scotia and I have yet to see a real fire escape, other than those seen in pictures or movies. Are they only an American building structure?
posted by debralee at 9:02 PM on September 13, 2002

i like the slower pace at which the photographer considered the fire escapes... as most of the time people are either running away from fire, see them from the street, or only hang out on one floor of them.
posted by the aloha at 10:18 PM on September 13, 2002

debralee: I wouldn't have thought so--they're often required for fire safety codes here, and I expect they are in other countries. But they do tend to appear in the kind of lower-class neighborhoods of old-ish brick apartment building that I didn't see much of the one time I was in Nova Scotia.
posted by hippugeek at 10:20 PM on September 13, 2002

debrelee, we've got tons in Toronto.
posted by dobbs at 9:13 AM on September 14, 2002

It was my impression that fire escapes were mainly retrofitted to older buildings whose interiors didn't meet code when the code was upgraded.
posted by kindall at 9:46 AM on September 14, 2002