The romance was born of necessity. Before air-conditioning, fire escapes offered New Yorkers a refuge from tenements in the summer heat. They read there. They drank there. At night, they slept there.

Introduced in the mid-1800s, the iron Z’s that still cling to thousands of city apartment buildings became so synonymous with New York life that they made cameos in “West Side Story,” “Rear Window” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Since then, air-conditioning and modern fire prevention have chipped away at the necessity of fire escapes. But the romance remains: In a city of people starved for space, light and air, fire escapes double as storage closets, front porches and back gardens, a perch of one’s own above the bustle of the street.

It was to sit outside with a friend that Kyle Jean-Baptiste, the 21-year-old actor who had made a name for himself as the first African-American man to play the role of Jean Valjean in “Les Misérables” on Broadway, clambered onto the fourth-floor fire escape of an apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Friday. Mr. Jean-Baptiste had wrapped up his final scheduled performance as Valjean the night before and was to leave the show on Sept. 6 to join the new Broadway production of “The Color Purple.”

Out on the fire escape, the police said, Mr. Jean-Baptiste stood up, slipped, fell backward onto the street below and died. His death “appeared to be accidental,” the police said. They did not provide any other details.