one form of New York skyline

When I first came to New York, in 1979, I was just fascinated by the fire escapes - nothing like them in London, marching up the front of buildings - and took (like any first-timer) a little set of black and white pictures of them.  I keep having to remind myself of film - and how expensive it was, and how expensive it was either to have them developed and printed, or rent darkroom time, and how that made one very, very selective in what one shot.  But I couldn't resist those fire escapes, and all my early NY photos seem either to be of them, or of muscular African-American guys playing basketball on those little courts in Soho with wire mesh fencing round them.