Fire Stair

By Mark Fitzgerald

Old buildings often had two stairs. One ornamental stair that connected all floors at the lobby. All way to the top; dangerously interconnecting every floor to any floor with a fire. They also had a fire stair. In the Burns Building the fires stair also interconnects all the floors;temporally not spatially.In a single day, it is November 22, 1963, 1973 and 1983. Lives are saved. Lives are lost. Love is found. Friends are lost. History in made and unmade.

This might be a better movie than a book. You decide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Fitzgerald
• Release date: Sep 18, 2011
• ISBN: 9781466031968

Book preview

Fire Stair

Mark Fitzgerald

Copyright 2010 by Mark Fitzgerald

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Chapter One

All my best dreams are about buildings.

Exploring them. Never new buildings. Nothing contemporary. Always vintage buildings; ideally from the turn of the twentieth century. Mercantile buildings, best of all.

I have had dreams of buildings where I was utterly agog at the magnificence of them. Of interiors of byzantine complexity and gothic proportion.

I have had dreams of derelict tenements that I feared to climb the dark stairs to my dingy suite somewhere above.

I have had dreams of a familial home of extraordinary complexity; my widowed mother still commanded; with rooms I had discovered before and rooms I discovered with each nocturnal homecoming.

Even in my waking life, I am drawn to the secrets of old and abandoned buildings. I would find it unbelievable if other folks weren't.

I think Freud postulated that building dreams were sexual. You enter buildings so they must be vaginal. Cool. God Almighty Freud was a horny sonofabitch.

Lucky, I am an architecture student. I come across the objects of my lust often enough, and I can use my para- professional title to warrant my intrusion of them.

As a child, I was tantalized by houses. Old houses. Like the one below the hill, our post war neighborhood had been built upon; an abandoned golf course on a plateau. The second plateau upward from the river that flowed through the core of the city. The house below the hill was post- Victorian. It had a tower on the corner, and a wrap around porch and a low stone wall defining its territory. It also had a reputation. It was the home of a doctor of sorts. Doctor Victor Frankenstein? Only later did we understand that the doctor was not one who created life, but one who snuffed it out. An abortionist.

One Saturday, Rex and I…. Rex was my best friend… two houses down… decided to pull a caper. We were walking the mile to the little store that sold candy and comics; to be quickly rid of our allowances. The house was about halfway, at the very base of the hill upon which our neighborhood, Snob Hill, was located. Coming back from the store, empty handed already as we had ingested all the sugar