Fire escape security gate

You can also consider the retractable grilles. They are durable and fancy, it do not looks ugly at all. The advantage about retractable grilles is that they can be stacked out of sight behind the blinds or curtains when not required. They are made to measure to suit your openings and can either be reveal fitted or face fitted which means you do not have to spend money on adjusting your door or window openings.

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I’ve always preferred those ones with vertical and horizonal bars, with some scrolls on them to add some design, with a door that opens in easily. Once you paint them white (and the hardware store you order from will do this), they aren’t nearly as ugly as the accordion ones, as there’s a lot less metal in them, so they block the light a lot less.

You can also get custom arty designs on the door ones that look better if you want to spend some bucks, as long as the opening mechanism is the same – it is the ease of opening that the fire department cares about. (Yours probably meets their code just fine – they just want it not locked and thus openable in a fire – they don’t care about how well it keeps out burglars.)

Though how easily some of them actually open is a debatable issue. The ones I find hardest to open are the accordion kind with smaller holes rather than larger ones, where the latch is in a little box under a flap you have to flip up. This is likely what you already have on a fire escape window, as the slightly-less-ugly accordion ones with bigger holes in them don’t have the jimmy-proof locks, and are usually secured with padlocks, which is a fire department no-no on a fire escape window.

For a fire escape, I find the ones with the door in them easier to open than the small-hole accordion ones. And they are less ugly.

I meant to replace my ugly accordion one in my place with one of those door ones, but I relized that the door wouldn’t open very far without bumping into the radiator, which sticks out partly in front of the window, so I left the accordion one. Ugly. But as it is in my bedroom, where I hardly ever open the blinds anyway, I just leave the blinds covering it closed so I forget about it. (I have another window in the room for a window AC and occasional opening of the blinds and/or window for air and light.) That’s the easiest option – dress your window.

If it was in the living room, I’d have replaced it by now with something less ugly, even if I had to have it custom-made at some expense. There are lots of good iron guys in Brooklyn who do this stuff.

Many people take the gate off completely and go with alarms, but I like the safety of a gate, especially on a fire escape, as they are just too much temptation, especially if you sometimes leave the window open while you sleep, or are not in the room. But then, I have been burglarized, more than once, in Park Slope, by people coming down the ladder from the roof to a previous top floor place, even where they risked falling to the ground, standing on the sill of a window with no fire escape to open the window and crowbar off the 2 padlocks on the accordion gate on that window. So I’d go with a nicer gate if I were you.

‘Easy to open’? Are you sure this gate meets code? It’s supposed to be easy to open in case of a fire. Might want to check with the board or managing agent to see. How’s crime in your ‘hood? Possibly get rid of it altogether. Those gates are so ’70s.