Whats with the fire-escape at the Buchmans apartment?
There is talk of there being no fire-escape at their apartment [1.13], and all exterior shots reflect this. However, there has to be one, as Paul climbs out of the bathroom window onto one [2.13]. In the third season, the fire-escape is featured often [3.1, 3.2, 3.4, 3.6, 3.11]. This amounts to wholescale contradiction, since the whole premise of Paul and Jamie being locked up in their bathroom [1.16] depends on there being no fire-escape. • A reality check: Pre-war 16-storey buildings in the Lower Manhattan and Greenwich Village area do not have fire-escapes; they have interior stairwells. 14 floors of fire-escapes, running bedroom to bedroom from 11-C to 11-D [3.2, 3.4], makes for a rather heavy exterior metal structure, that usually has short spans. By contrast, both Ira’s and Lisa’s apartment buildings have fire-escapes, the latter used as the locale of a particularly memorable sisterly argument in [1.19]. The same is true of the elder Buchmans’ apartment [2.24].
