Soon after the Randolph Mills fire, the Franklin Institute formed a committee to take up the question of fire escapes. Iron Fire Escapes and the Philadelphia Fire Tower However, police officers had no background in the design and installation of fire escapes. A few days after the fire, Mayor Samuel King (1816-99, in office 1881-84) ordered the police to notify owners of factories, tenements, and other buildings to erect fire escapes, pursuant to the 1879 state act. The horror of the tragedy–burned, crushed, and broken bodies–motivated city leaders to do something about fire escapes. The coroner’s jury found the building owner criminally responsible for the loss of life, and it also found the City of Philadelphia responsible for not enforcing the fire escape law. The fire stirred public indignation and demands for government to compel mill owners to provide adequate means of emergency egress. Sixteen other employees suffered serious injuries. Nine died in the fire or after jumping, five of them teenagers. Workers on the floors above became trapped when fire engulfed the building’s stairway. The mill’s new electric lights were believed to have been the cause of the fire, which started on the second floor. About forty people were working the night shift at the time of the second fire. But even as he rebuilt the mill, the building owner did not do so–he considered fire escapes unnecessary. Before the first mill burned down, the Fire Escape Board had advised the owner to put up a fire escape. This large textile factory, on Randolph Street in North Philadelphia, was built in 1878–ironically, on the ruins of a mill that burned down the previous year. (Photograph by Sara Wermiel)Ī deadly fire in a Philadelphia factory, Randolph Mills, on the night of October 12, 1881, exposed the possible catastrophic consequences of a lack of adequate egress. 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.
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