Keep Your Fire Escapes Clear: A Poster for Tenement New York
Look closely at the fire escape and you can inventory a whole tenement life. Flower pots crowd the top balcony. A green armchair is being aired, or stored, on the landing. Laundry hangs from the rails, a broom and bucket stand ready, and at the right edge a dog leans out into the red air, watching the street. It is charming, and it is exactly the problem: every one of those objects is standing in the only way out of a burning building.
KEEP YOUR FIRE ESCAPES CLEAR, says the green band at the bottom, in the friendliest lettering imaginable. The poster was made for the Tenement House Department of the City of New York and printed by the city's Federal Art Project workshop; the Library of Congress copy is dated by its stamp, April 16, 1937. The surviving records attribute the design to an artist named only as Muller.
From the Collection
Vintage 1930s NYC Safety Poster – Keep Your Fire Escapes Clear
Issued by New York's Tenement House Department and printed by the Federal Art Project, dated April 1937.
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Why a Poster About Housekeeping
New York's tenements were the densest housing in America, and fire was their oldest enemy. The fire escape, bolted to the facade as the law required, was supposed to be an empty iron balcony kept ready for one purpose. In practice, in apartments with no storage, no yard and no balcony of any other kind, the fire escape became all three, and in fire after fire the clutter cost lives as families met furniture, boxes and each other on stairs meant for escape.
The Tenement House Department, the city agency charged with housing conditions since the Tenement House Act era, fought the habit with inspections and with publicity. Under Mayor LaGuardia and Tenement House Commissioner Langdon W. Post, the department had a new tool: the WPA poster workshop, which could turn a regulation into an image a whole neighborhood would stop and read.
The Design
The poster is a silkscreen in four flat colors, black, white, green and a brick red the exact color of a tenement wall, and the composition is a kind of controlled tumble. The fire escape zigzags down the sheet on a steep diagonal, balcony over balcony, and the clutter is arranged so the eye trips over it the way a fleeing tenant would: chair, laundry, plants, bucket, dog. The joke is structural. The poster makes you rehearse the obstacle course.
Notice what is absent: no flames, no victims, no horror at all. Earlier safety publicity loved a scare. The WPA artists, working in the modernist language the New York workshop had made its own, chose wit instead, and the result is a warning people might actually enjoy looking at, which is the only kind of warning that stays on a wall. The chunky white capitals on the green band do the scolding; the picture does the persuading.
The New York Workshop
The poster came out of the most inventive print shop in America at that moment. The Federal Art Project's New York poster division, the first and largest of the WPA workshops, had turned silkscreen from a commercial stencil process into a fine poster medium, printing in editions large enough to cover a city. Its artists produced posters for health clinics, concerts, exhibitions and housing campaigns in a house style of flat color and bold geometry that the whole country came to recognize.
A municipal client list like the Tenement House Department's shows what the program was really for. The same payroll that employed painters to decorate post offices employed designers to keep tenement stairs empty, and it treated both jobs as art worth doing well. The fire escape poster is public information raised to the level of design, and it has outlived the department that commissioned it.
The Poster as Neighbor
Consider where this poster was meant to hang: in the halls and vestibules of the tenements themselves, in housing offices, in the stations of the inspectors who enforced the rules it advertised. Its audience passed it daily, and its design respects that familiarity. There is no headline shock, no official seal doing the talking. Instead it offers the tenants their own balcony back, drawn with affection and accuracy, the chair, the plants, the laundry, the dog, and lets them draw the conclusion the department needed: all of it has to go.
That is a sophisticated theory of persuasion for 1937, and it marks the distance between the WPA workshops and ordinary government printing. The poster behaves like a neighbor rather than a policeman. Historians of the Federal Art Project point to exactly this quality, useful beauty in the service of ordinary administration, as the program's real legacy, more durable than its murals: the discovery that a city speaks better to its citizens when it bothers to speak beautifully.
The Iron Balconies Today
The cast iron fire escape is now so identified with old New York that it reads as pure atmosphere, the facade furniture of a thousand films. In 1937 it was contested equipment, resented by landlords, abused by tenants, argued over by inspectors. This poster is the argument at its most civilized: keep the balcony empty, it says, and says it with a dog, a chair and a row of flower pots, in red, black and green.
It survives in the Library of Congress WPA Poster Collection, filed beside the airport and zoo posters from the same workshops, the whole improbable output of a jobs program that decided a city's notices deserved artists. Few of its notices are still needed. This one, wherever iron balconies remain, still is.
