8/17/2023 0 Comments Fire escape![]() Randolph Mills Fire of 1881 This external iron fire escape at Third and Chestnut Streets is accessed through windows. For example, five years after the ordinance passed, and two after the state law, few factories in Philadelphia had fire escapes. Without any enforcement, few building owners voluntarily complied with either law. Philadelphia’s City Councils took the occasion of this law to discontinue funding for the Fire Escape Board, thereby allowing the city’s ordinance to lapse. Moreover, the legislature provided no resources, no state officers, and no funds to enforce the act. It gave no guidance on what a fire escape should be like, apart from being permanent and external. Like the Philadelphia law, the state act specified that fire escapes be “permanent,” and now they also had to be “external.” It obliged not only building owners, but also building managers, to put in the fire escapes. ![]() Soon thereafter, in 1879, Pennsylvania’s legislature passed a fire escape law. ![]() Significantly, the law applied to existing buildings as well as new construction, and by specifying that fire escapes be “erected,” assumed these would be structures in or on buildings. The law created a Board of Fire Escapes, which could order the construction of fire escapes on any building, in whatever form the board believed best. This ordinance had been proposed by the chief engineer of Philadelphia’s newly organized, paid fire department, partly in anticipation of the crowds expected to attend the Centennial Exhibition but mainly because of deadly fires in factories. In 1876, Philadelphia enacted the first municipal fire escape law in the United States. Some building owners ordered ornamental fire escapes, like this one at Thirteenth and Chestnut Streets, to improve their appearance. Many felt that outside fire escapes disfigured a building. Philadelphia enacted the first municipal law mandating fire escapes on all sorts of buildings and is associated with an important innovation in fire escape design: the Philadelphia fire tower. Fire escapes can be portable or fixed on or in buildings, and they have taken many forms. Introduced in the nineteenth century, fire escapes supplemented interior stairways to allow people on the upper floors of buildings to escape in case of fire. Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Back.
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