A dirty secret (?) is that a lot of the stairways you encounter are not built to code, either because they were built before current codes were put into place or because they were modified after inspection. A common practice is for certain required elements to be included in a way that makes them easy to remove. My girlfriend pointed out an instance of that to me recently — if you looked closely you could see that a handrail (the round bar you can hold onto while you walk on the stairs) had been mounted to the guardrail (the panel that makes it impossible to fall off the stairs sideways) and then removed. She said it was probably added to pass inspection because the guardrail, which was a very beautiful metal design, did not technically qualify as a handrail. Either the stairs failed inspection and the contractor temporarily fixed it up by adding the handrail, or more likely, the designer anticipated the inspection issue and included a cheap handrail for the owner (or more likely the contractor) to remove after inspection. Some people welcome the challenge of designing to code, but some people just resent it and circumvent it whenever they can.