Take a walk through any neighborhood surrounding NYU’s campus, and you’ll see them zigzagging down every brick and terracotta facade: iconic metal fire escapes. Maybe they’re creating a picturesque background for your SoHo photo dump, or they’re just something you absentmindedly glance at on your walk to a friend’s apartment in the East Village. 

Either way, fire escapes are an iconic, historic part of New York City’s architecture — dating back to 1867, when legislation aimed to develop safer infrastructure for tenement homes, where mainly immigrants and labor workers lived. But even then, they weren’t just used for emergencies. They were a small corner of the city where working-class New Yorkers carved out small moments of autonomy and rest in a space between a cramped, suffocating interior holding generations of family and the relentless city just outside.

Now, fire escapes have quietly taken on a second life for our university’s students. With a city campus that doesn’t have many outdoor or congregational spaces like a quad or a football field and is increasingly barred off, students can find solace just outside their windows. 

In my junior year, I moved off campus and lived in my first apartment — a second-floor walk-up in the East Village. And when the air conditioning didn’t work all summer, the fridge stopped keeping food cold and the stress of college life got to me, the fire escape that looked out to buildings across from mine offered a different kind of escape. It became what made bad days more manageable and good nights last longer.

Even in the middle of winter, I’ve crawled through a window onto the rusted platform as a group of friends accompanied me to take a break from a crowded party. Sans coat or shoes, the six of us squeezed onto the metal grates in our socks, swapped random stories and pretended we weren’t freezing. Conversing in an intimate kind of third place, I remember this night as a time I felt that my friends and I were still a part of the city, but somehow had a corner that was entirely our own.

Fire escapes are where a stranger offers you a cigarette and a listening ear, and the conversation shifts to something more candid than, “What are you drinking?” Whether you smoke or not, it’s nice to just have a reason to stand still and breathe. Fire escapes are where you read a good book with a cup of coffee when the air starts warming up, or where you check the weather in the morning before deciding what to wear. They’re where you take phone calls, take pictures, chat, cry, flirt, make out, people-watch, relax and take moments to think when the stress of the city overwhelms you. 

It’s true that fire escapes weren’t exactly designed for modern New York life. Today’s buildings mostly rely on indoor staircases and sprinklers for fire safety. But fire escapes still have value for students trying to find space, unfiltered conversation or just some time alone at a school where these things are notoriously hard to find.