Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Fire Escape Slide

Fire escape slide on west side of St. Vincent School
[Courtesy of: Cleo Bee Jones]

I am not sure when the fire escape was put in, but laws were proposed to mandate them by the state as early as the late 1880s.

The type of slide St. Vincent installed was a metal slide/chute, the type commonly installed in the 1930s...

Another shot of fire escape slide - Many times I crawled up it in
bare feet - metal hot -during summer breaks, just to slide down!

[From the Jamie Rustad Meagher Collection]

1 comment:

  1. I went to school in Winnipeg and my school, J.M.King,1941-1946, had a circular steel fire escape for the second floor. It had a large steel door at the bottom that could not be opened from the outside. When we had a fire escape drill, the first child down the shoot was the largest one. He sat on a burlap sack so that he cleaned the slide for all those that followed. The inside of the bottom door had a large metal plate and when the first person down hit it with his feet, the doors unlocked and swung open. Only once did I get to go first and it was pitch dark all the way down until the doors burst open.

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