Fire escapes were long a fixture of American cities, offering a way out when a fire blocked the main stairwell. In the dense, tall buildings of the early United States, evacuation grew more complicated as factories, tenements, office buildings, and theaters suffered frequent, horrific fires. The external fire escape, a metal staircase bolted to the outside of a building with a landing beneath a window on each floor, seemed an obvious answer to many.
Fire escapes also became part of American culture well beyond their function as safety equipment. They appear as dramatic devices in films and plays, offer urbanites a scenic place for fresh air, and give the skylines of the nation's oldest cities their distinctive character. Yet experts have never fully agreed on how well fire escapes actually work, or whether they were ever the right solution. Many older buildings still have their original fire escapes, but they have slowly begun to disappear.
The story of their decline is a revealing case study in how building codes work. Owners rarely install safety devices out of goodness alone. Because such equipment may never be needed over a building's lifetime, weighing its costs and benefits is difficult, and real estate economics do not reward going above and beyond. Building safety seldom drives tenants' purchasing decisions, so it has little effect on a landlord's bottom line. At the same time, packing a building with too many safety features would leave no usable space, so some reasonable line must sit between no safety and overkill.
That is the purpose of building codes: a well-informed consensus about what is worth it. Fire escapes arose from this kind of collective judgment. By the mid-1800s, cities such as New York, Boston, and Chicago were building tall tenements, crowded housing for poor immigrants and laborers designed for efficiency. Open stairways in these buildings funneled smoke and flame, and by the 1860s cities had begun to recognize the fire safety problem.
Source: Hacker News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing