Online photos show Rochester's fire escapes, a step into city's history

Brian Gordon | Special to Rochester Democrat and Chronicle USA TODAY NETWORK

The 11 a.m. sun trickles down a short downtown alleyway, casting shadows on Jim Bonham and the fire escapes he hunts.

The 51-year old Monroe High School graduate negotiates dumpsters, uneven pavement and minor urban debris, looking skyward with his Fujifilm camera for an ideal shot. He pauses at a black four-story fire escape behind an office building off Graves Street by the Genesee River.

“That one’s just much too busy. See the overlapping shadows.” Temporarily deflated, Bonham moves on to the next city block.

The former market researcher and amateur shutterbug is an urban explorer, often shortened to “urbex,” a diverse, loosely affiliated group that documents the officially inaccessible elements of Rochester: abandoned buildings, underground tunnels and any area obscured from ordinary life. In fire escapes, Bonham finds an anchor for his exploration, a specific item to seek out on his weekend excursions through a downtown he knows well.

Focusing on the steps, twists and contours of city fire escapes, Bonham’s ongoing series "Escape from Rochester" considers something often seen but not always regarded. Receiving increasing attention online, the silhouetted photographs reflect familiar buildings in altered angles, depicting modern Rochester through a staple of its past.

Wordplay, more than aesthetics or history, brought Bonham to the fire escape series. He had the "Escape from Rochester" title in his head before a single lens was aimed.

“It was the idea that many people talk down to the city and try to leave Rochester,” Bonham says. “People think the title means one thing, but it’s something else. I like to keep them on their toes.”

Across two days in 2010, Bonham traversed his hometown, photographing exterior fire escapes from street level. He uploaded 36 pictures, in color, to Flickr, an image hosting site popular in the early 2010s. For eight years, the pictures sat there, garnering few views and only a handful of comments. As years progressed, Bonham’s coffee table book was becoming a pipedream.

A friend with a photography degree mentioned the images possessed a different life when drained of color and were worth sharing once more. Bonham reposted the first picture in black and white on Reddit last March.

“There’s something about the lack of distraction that makes it more dramatic,” he says. “I like to shoot in sharp light and the shadows provide a lot of detail.”

Now on Reddit account BeerdedRNY, Bonham’s fire escapes gained traction. "Escape from Rochester #1-6" is receiving thousands of views and hundreds of upvotes, Reddit’s version of a “like button.” Scrolling Reddit over summer break, RIT student Zachary Talis discovered Escape from Rochester #6. The computer science major was instantly drawn to the photograph, an underneath shot of grated escape levels ascending into the sky.

“It’s not usual to understand the fire escape as a solid object with such thin pieces of metal connected exactly in place,” Talis says of #6, his favorite in the series. “People are starting to have a lot of nostalgia for the city. The cropping makes the fire escapes feel distant from everything else, very singular. Everything is framed like a memory.”

Others on Reddit have made a game of are guessing which building the fire escapes are affixed to before Bonham ultimately reveals the location. Escape from Rochester #6 is from the Columbus Building across the former Hotel Cadillac on Chestnut Street.

Back in another alley near Water Street, with train cars rambling across the Inner Loop, Bonham sees opportunity. “I just saw a great framing device. If I shift over this way, I can use the lamp posts to create more subject manner.” Reframing how Rochesterians view their city is at the heart of "Escape from Rochester."

From an empty parking lot behind the American Journal Building at the corner of St. Paul and Andrews streets, Bonham broadly focuses on a thin fire escape and the expansive eagle mural decorated below. The worn magenta building was home to the American Journal, a William Randolph Hearst-owned publication that battled fellow newspaper tycoon Frank Gannett in the 1920s and 1930s. Gannett bought and dismantled the American Journal in 1937.

Moving to the building’s front, Bonham studies the moldings adorning the doorway arches, marveling at their patterned intricacies.

“People know the views from Main Street by heart,” Bonham says. “My goal is to expose people to views and stories of their city they don’t know. To think about the spaces differently.”

In the early-1990s, Bonham ate breakfast on his apartment’s fire escape above the since-closed Spiro’s Diner in Oxford Square. Many would pass by, yet Bonham, perched only a floor above, would go unnoticed. “Look up, look down, don’t always just look straightforward. Don’t always look at something from the same angle. It applies to life too.”

Since surviving a heart attack a year ago, Bonham has leaned on urban exploration photography to alleviate stress and fill hours in his week. He left his marketing job and has since lost 35 pounds. With white invading his ginger beard, Bonham says he is the healthiest he’s been in two decades and enjoys having more time for his favorite hobby.

For most of his childhood, service in the Air Force and after, the camera was nothing more than a vehicle for standard tourist pictures on overseas travels. Then Chris urged him to read up on the craft via the website of Ken Rowell, a prominent American photographer. From Rowell’s teachings, Bonham picked up composition techniques and the importance of framing. Bonham was gifted with his Fuji HS-10 soon after, a bridge camera that spans the gulf between simple and complex functions.

He lives in the same Upper Monroe neighborhood of his childhood. “I love the scale of the city. It’s livable yet there’s still an urban area to enjoy and shoot.”

No new fire escapes

There are no new fire escapes in Rochester. State ordinances that made them mandatory in the building boom of the late-1800s have now barred the metal exits on structures built after 2010. Existing escapes can be grandfathered into modern safety codes, but only if they are adequately maintained.

“I wouldn’t say (metal exterior) fire escapes are obsolete, but we now build buildings with more robust interior fire-safety features,” says Edward Kuppinger, Captain of Fire Safety for the City of Rochester. “You can’t just have a metal thing attached to your building anymore. The building code is changing how those types of fire escapes are going away.”

Today, most steel and iron fire escapes around town are not for escaping fires. They are vestigial limbs of urban life, relegated to platforms from which tenants hang laundry or catch sunsets with significant others.

Bonham’s ambitions for "Escape from Rochester" are not as high as the fire escapes themselves. He still considers compiling the photos into a do-it-yourself coffee table book, to give to friends as gifts, with historical blurbs accompanying each photograph, but Bonham is also content with simply adding to the series on Reddit and letting the community react.

As he looks to return to work, Bonham will continue doing urbex, brazenly entering renovating restaurants, condemned structures and private spaces he is not supposed to be. Recently, he was escorted from the Xerox Tower premises for taking photographs from their outdoor plaza. “It’s a little bit of fun going where you’re not supposed to go.”

Standing two blocks from the Liberty Pole, Bonham zooms in on one last fire escape of the morning. The sun is noon high, projecting no shadows against a brick wall. He lowers his camera. “I have walked every inch of downtown a million times in my life,” Bonham says. He hopes people can appreciate the city, at ground-level and above, from a new angle. “There’s a lot more to see than you think.”

Bonham does not have a website or a book for sale. His photos can be found posted on his Reddit account at BeerdedRNY and his Flickr account, ZedOmega.

Brian Gordon is a freelance writer in the Rochester area

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