In the summer, one should sit on metal scaffolding and drink tea or Pimm’s cups and eat meze. The following paean to metal scaffolding did steal my heart, when I found it buried deep within a book about urban adventure and the history of New York, a book otherwise readable but at no other point cockles-stirring, poetical, or propelled by such singular, semicolonic grace.

What, in fire escapes, do I admire? Their universality: their equal utility across cities and neighborhoods; their economy of design: their rugged skeletal strength and transparent unity: their spontaneous novelty: the simply sturdy curves overlapping when viewed from a given vantage, filtering the masonry or brick: their constancy: sound as a dollar, firm as Gibraltar, unshaken by the decades, neglected yet shouldering their vital charge, clinging, like Ulysses to his barque, through hurricanes, freezing gales of winter: safely conducting bolts of lightning; supporting, as Atlas, the gravid snows of winter: the variation within an essential form, like the very snowflake, each unique yet all bound by unyielding laws of construction: their balance, supporting the disproportionate mass with the well-placed lever arm: their hospitality, Ralph and Alice being neither the first nor the last to avail themselves in the heat of summer, and this tradition remaining firmly in place throughout the urban world from New York to California and Hong Kong: their elasticity, swelling in the humid summers, shrinking in winter months like the boards of the Ancient Mariner’s ship: their uncomplaining servility in blurring uneventful years: their silent heroism in the teeth of a four-alarm blaze: their romantic accessibility, climbing from the sidewalk into the starry firmament.

—Invisible Frontiers, Lefty Leibowitz and L. B. Deyo, officers of Jinx (a defunct [?] Libertarian urban exploration group).