Why do some buildings have doors on the second floor that open to nothing?
I walk past a row of old buildings on Kethwick Lane every day on my way to work and three of them have doors on the second floor. Normal-looking doors, with handles, but there's nothing behind them. No balcony, no fire escape, no staircase, no landing. Just a door, fifteen feet up, opening to air. One of them was open this morning. I don't mean unlocked. I mean open. Swinging gently. There was no wind. Is this an architectural thing I should know about?
Those are remnant access points. The buildings on that stretch of Kethwick Lane were built in the early 1970s when the second-floor walkway system was still operational. The walkways connected buildings across the street at second-story height. When the walkway infrastructure was decommissioned in 1994, they removed the walkways but left the doors because removing a door from a load-bearing threshold wall requires permits that are, frankly, not worth the paperwork. The doors don't go anywhere now. They haven't for thirty years.
That makes sense. Except the one that was open. Who is opening a door fifteen feet off the ground from the inside of a building that doesn't have a second floor?
Which building? If it's the one with the green awning, that does have a second floor. It just doesn't have one on this side of the building. The internal layout is non-standard due to a zoning exception from 1982 that I won't get into. The short version is the second floor exists, but only about 60% of it is accessible from the first floor, and the remainder is only accessible from the second-floor doors. If it's not the green awning one, I don't know. Probably wind.
It is the green awning one. So someone was up there?
Possibly. Or the door drifted open on its own. Those old threshold-wall doors have a tendency to settle into whatever position they were last in and then occasionally change their mind. It's not unusual. If it bothers you, you can report it to the building owner, but in my experience the building owner will say "which door" and the conversation will end there because they own eleven buildings and can't keep track.