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Fire Escapes: Up, Down, All Over This Town!

Dec 12, 2023

An essential piece of safety equipment, there's more to these iron monsters than meets the eye!

If you have one, you probably don’t spend much time thinking about it: the fire escape on the front or back of your apartment building. But as professional property managers who want to keep all our residents safe, we at Gaetani certainly do! 


The fire escapes on buildings managed by Gaetani are maintained by Great Escape Fire Escape Service, which which was founded by Eli Giaquinto, a retired New York firefighter, in 1988. It is currently operated by Terry and Letitia Walsh, who note that some of the fire escapes on older San Francisco Victorians can be more than 100 years old but are still in remarkably good working condition. 


Modern buildings have interior stairwells specifically constructed to act as fire escapes, so the grid of iron railings and ladders that make up the classic fire escape are unique to older structures. While some form of fire escape has been required since New York enacted building codes in the 1860s (These were mainly ropes and wooden ladders situated next to windows), the first modern metal fire escape was patented in 1887 by one Anna Connelly of Pennsylvania, and since then these metal structures have become a fixture of the urban architectural landscape.


The City of San Francisco requires fire escape inspections annually – from roof to ground, including everything from ladders to bars and cables. Every five years, the structural integrity of the facade to which they are attached is also required to be fully inspected. If the equipment is in good working order, Great Escape issues an affidavit of compliance. If it’s not, they note all the areas that need repair, but to avoid a conflict of interest they don’t do that work themselves – your Gaetani property manager assigns that to a specialist contractor.


So, hopefully you won’t ever have to use your fire escape in an emergency, but if you do, you can thank the good folks at Great Escape for keeping you safe!

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