and he notes - There are many old mill buildings within a few miles from where I live. Some have stair wells with fire doors and some have just enclosed stair wells with a door (either removed or left open). Most have fire escapes either adjacent to the stairs or at other strategic locations. But this is New England with old knitting mills so locations and style may vary in other parts of the country.
I worked as a Purchasing Manager in such a building many years ago and was stuck with the job of facility management. The company made coruscating beacons, the types of flashing lights seen on tall chimneys, cooling towers and radio antennas, etc. These beacons utilize a xenon burst tube (similar to a camera strobe light but much larger) which produces a flash brighter than sunlight in order to warn aircraft of the danger ahead. We had one section of the top floor (it was an old shoe shop and before that a bobbin factory) where the beacons were tested and 'burned in' for 24 hours before shipment. The test room was the length of a bowling alley with walls and painted out windows to keep the strobe lights from illuminating the nearby homes, especially at night. I supervised the building of the test room when we moved from a smaller facility to that building and to save time and money, we decided to paint the windows with several coats of grey primer. It worked fine the first day of testing but that night, the sky lit up above the building like a flashing searchlight. We forgot the d- -mned skylight! I got a call that the building was on fire and rushed down to see fire trucks and a crowd of people wondering what the heck we were doing in there. After a bit of explaining, the lab was shut down for the night and needless to say next morning I had a maintenance crew on the roof painting the skylight. Within a year the company had expanded and a second test room was built only this time we didn't forget the skylight! This was an old building with the front entrance and stair well (in typical 19th century New England mill style) in a tower. But there was another stair well at the rear of the building and a fire escape which was probably added after the Triangle Shirt Factory fire when fire codes became more restrictive. It was made of wrought iron and a kind of rickety thing. I tried to talk the company into replacing it but they wouldn't agree to it and I presume it's still there. There were steel doors on each landing to get to it and we did replace a couple that had rusted shut but that was about all. I guess the company didn't think the product we made posed much of a fire hazard. We did have a freight elevator right in the middle of the building obviously added in the 20th century as the shaft was made of concrete. It may have replaced an older one as I've seen one in another building that was essentially open with an iron cage enclosure on each floor. Anyway the d -mned thing seemed to work when it wanted to and more then once the crew had t' carry the beacons down the back stairs to the shipping room! I caught a lot of grief over that one and never did get it t' run right. The drive motor looked like something Edison built - a big open frame affair that sounded like a meat grinder when it ran. We had an old guy in maintenance that worked in that building since he was a kid. He said it was a good motor - just needed a little TLC. I think he was just protecting his job! It was a four story building and we sub-let part of the third floor (where our office was located) to a rug dealer. I dated the owner's secretary for a while then she ups and marries the guy. I had better luck getting the elevator to work - women - cheesh! That was thirty-five years ago and the company is long gone. They sold to a larger company and moved the operation to upstate New York. I left them to move to Virginia where I took a job as Director of Purchasing for an electronics company and was involved in the construction of a new 125,000 sq. ft. tilt up wall building. One floor - no elevators, no windows (except in the office area) and NO skylights! Raleigh in chilly Maine... ;-) BTW - The building had a loading dock and rail siding in the rear and once a week the B&M used it as a team track for unloading newsprint for the local paper. Quite often the cars blocked our shipping door and I called them once and the freight agent told me that the prior owners didn't care since the building had been vacant for a number of years and it was closer to the paper than the freight yard. They usually picked them up in a day or two but not always so we'd just open both car doors and run shipments through to the waiting truck. Try that on a model railroad! At 10:10 PM 9/8/2008, pickycat95 wrote: >In the old days before inexpensive electric lighting skylights were >frequently used to bring daylight into the interior of large floor >plates. They were also used over (grand) stairs and also interior >light shafts on to which windows opened in order to bring daylight into >interior areas of buildings. Many times these light wells were open in >order to provide 'fresh air' to these interior spaces. Daylight issues >are also why there were so many courtyard type buildings with narrow >wings with windows on both sides. > >Fire escapes were typically needed where there were no enclosed >interior stairs nearby. They served, as the current building code >lingo states, as a 'required means of egress'. Therefore I think it is >unlikely they were paired with adjacent enclosed interior stairs. They >were served by either doors or windows and they could switch back from >floor to floor or with intermediate landings between floors where the >stairs changed direction. > >Ben Trousdale, AIA > >--- In <mailto:S-Scale%40yahoogroups.com>[email protected], >raleigh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > If you intend to add floors to the interior, (I assume it doesn't > > come with them) the stairwells would be in line with the fire escapes > > and enclosed. The roof entrance would be in line with the stair wells > > (and fire escape doors. The skylight is typically placed over the > > stairwell but not always. The windows wouldn't have curtains unless > > it was an apartment house. > > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/S-Scale/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
