The Wingfield apartment is located at the back of one of those enormous hive-like buildings with cells, which sprout like rashes in the densely populated middle-class neighborhoods, and are the result of the tendency of this vast, enslaved segment of American society to escape fluidity and differentiation from the "upper classes," and to exist and function as an automatic mass.

The Wingfield apartment "overlooks" an alley, and its entrance is the iron "emergency staircase," the "fire escape," as it is called - a name coincidentally poetic, because all these gigantic buildings are continuously burning with the slow and relentless fire of human despair.