(1960s) IMAGINARY SPACES FOR AN IMAGINARY WAR: FALLOUT SHELTERS IN NEW YORK CITY

IMAGINARY SPACES FOR AN IMAGINARY WAR: FALLOUT SHELTERS IN NEW YORK CITY

FINDING A REAL FALLOUT SHELTER IN NYC

       THIS POST IS THE RESULT OF OTHERS DIGGING AROUND THE HISTORY OF NYC AND I AM GLAD TO POST IT HERE.NYC REALLY WENT FOR THE WHOLE CIVIL DEFENSE POSTURE DURING WORLD WAR TWO AND STRAIGHT IN TO THE COLD WAR, WHEN THE REALITY OF PEOPLE SHELTERING IN TARGET AREAS UNDERNEATH 50 STORY BUILDINGS MADE OF IRON AND CEMENT WAS REALIZED THE IDEA STARTED TO FADE AWAY. THE POORER AREAS OF THE FIVE BOROS IN THE RESIDENTIAL PARTS EVERY BUILDING IS CLEARLY MARKED. GO TO BROOKLYN OR THE LOWER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN ,THE SOUTH BRONX (ONLY LEGACY BUILDINGS THAT SURVIVED THE 1960s- 1980s SIGNS ARE EERILY STILL POSTED AND REFLECT LIGHT AS WELL AS THEIR FIRST DAY POSTED, MOST NEVER STOCKED OR IF THEY WERE THE MATERIAL WALKED OFF A LONG TIME AGO. BUT!!!! FALLOUT SHELTER HUNTERS OF NYC THERE ARE STILL SHELTERS STOCKED AND READY TO BE FOUND!! SO HUNT FOR THEM! THE INVENTORY INSIDE THESE BASEMENTS BELONGS TO WHOMEVER WANTS TO TAKE IT AS THE US GOVERNMENT AGREEMENT TO LEASE THE SPACE FOR AN EMERGENCY ATTACK OF THE NUCLEAR KIND IS NOW EXPIRED AND THE PARTIES INVOLVED ARE MOST LIKELY LONG GONE! FACTORIES ,SCHOOLS, THE PROJECTS, OLD GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS CITY OR FEDERAL , ASK TO LOOK AROUND, TAKE PICTURES AND LOOK OFFICIAL WHILE HUNTING, POSSIBLY LIKE A ARCHITECT OR A BUILDING SUPERVISOR WEAR A HARD HAT AND A SHIRT AND TIE TOPPED WITH A DAYGLO ORANGE VEST , BOOTS CARRY A FLASHLIGHT AND A BACKPACK, APPEAR TO BE LOOKING FOR THAT ADDRESS OFF A PIECE OF PAPER IN YOUR HAND WHEN APPROACHED. THIS WILL OPEN MANY DOORS AND WHAT YOU SAY AND HOW OFFICIAL YOU CAN APPEAR WILL CERTAINLY GET YOU IN! KNOW YOUR LIMITS AND CARRY A CELL PHONE ALWAYS. THE SHELTERS ARE WAITING TO BE FOUND AND IF YOU FIND ONE CONTACT ME ON THIS BLOG AND I WILL POST YOUR FIND!HAPPY SHELTER HUNTING! 

THE FIVE BORO'S BELOW AND THE RANGE OF TOTAL DESTRUCTION  ON NYC IF A A-BOMB OR H-BOMB WERE DROPPED ON NYC, THE A-BOMB IS CENTERED IN MANHATTAN IN THE 14th STREET AREA AND THE H-BOMB IS CENTERED  NEAR THE WILLIAMSBURG BRIDGE

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Let Me Die in My Footsteps: New Yorkers React to Fallout Shelters

I will not go down under the ground
‘Cause somebody tells me death’s coming round.
And I will not carry myself down to die
When I go to my grave my head will be high.

-          Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”

The above quote - from a bootleg Bob Dylan song recorded in 1962 – encapsulates some of the discomfort with the idea of fallout shelters that many Americans, including New Yorkers, shared. Dylan traced the impetus for the song to seeing a fallout shelter being built in Kansas. “As I watched them building,” said Dylan, “it struck me sort of funny that they would concentrate so much on digging a hole underground when there were so many other things they should do in life.”¹ Urban planner Robert Moses, "master builder" of New York City, expressed this same level of discomfort with the idea of building societies underground when he declared, “We are not going underground. We shall not evacuate and disperse. We shall not change our way of life. The sane people of this country will not take this threat seriously enough to support a fantastic national underground escapist program.”²

In addition to finding something un-American about the whole concept of burrowing underground, New Yorkers in particular would have been skeptical about the efficacy of a shelter program. Maps of areas of destruction caused by dropping an atomic bomb on a major American city were common in popular media and academic papers in the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the National Fallout Shelter Survey, the Soviets had tested a fifty megaton bomb (in comparisonto the 15 Kiloton bomb dropped on Hiroshima).³ The below figure, from the Annals of the New York Acadamey of Sciences, shows the expected damage from just a twenty megaton bomb dropped on Columbus Circle.⁴

SEE BELOW FOR LARGER VERSION OF ABOVE MAP

 TIMES SQUARE AT HIGH NOON DURING OPERATION ALERT A MANDATORY FALLOUT SHELTER DRILL INVOLVING THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES

The area of destruction that would have covered most of Manhattan and significant parts of the boroughs,  It's for this reason that New Yorkers who protested against civil defense and shelters cited the "false sense of security" of the programs or the fact that they were "virtually useless". Paul S. Boyer, a historian at the Univerity of Wisconsin-Madison, said the tendency of this period towards sheltering should not be intepreted as a sign of naivete. "Throughout this period, there was an enormous level of scepticism about this civil defense strategy of fallout shelters and stockpiling."⁵

New Yorkers also would have had a unique perspective on the fallout shelter debate because the National Fallout Shelter Survey Program was so effective in - at the very least - placing fallout shelter signs around New York City. This means that the debate was not entirerly theoretical as spaces in the built environment surrounding New Yorkers would have been re-defined as fallout shelters. In light of this, the National Shelter Survey Program sometimes created interesting cases of dissonance between the Office of Civil Defense and New York City residents when its need to designate locations as fallout shelters met residents expectations of how their living or working space should be defined and used.  For instance, residents of a row of tenement houses in Harlem protested when their vermin infested building was chosen as a fallout shelter. They said they would prefer to run in a case of nuclear war rather than shelter with the rats. The Office of Civil Defense agreed to take down the signs in that case. In another instance, City College gladly accepted fallout shelter signs until it realized they were also required to house supplies to meet the requirements for a shelter. City College preferred to use its space for classrooms and said it would take down the signs even as the Office of Civil Defense insisted it would go ahead with shelter plans for the university.

This is not to suggest that all New Yorkers rejected the shelter program out of hand. There are cases, such as Chase Manhattan bank or the residences at 10 Gracie Square, where New Yorkers were enthusiastic enough about shelters to create them even before the Office of Civil Defense got around to declaring their locations as shelter space or providing them with shelter supplies. However, there are just as many cases where buildings or institutions accepted a shelter sign but reacted very casually and/or indifferently to the needs of a fallout shelter. The Waldorf Astoria Hotel is one example. They were willing to accept supplies and become the first official hotel shelter in New York City, but they placeed the fallout shelter supplies in a "temporary" location on the not safe from nuclear blast roof of the hotel. (They blamed the lack of notice for this temporary storage.)
At the end of the day, for New Yorkers and Americans as well, there was always the question of whether outliving a nuclear war was even worth it.  As one civil defense protester at City Hall Park in Manhattan wrote in a sign, "After two weeks in a shelter, then what? No food, no water, hot dust and death."

ONE OF THE MANY MARKED FALLOUT SHELTERS IN PUBLIC BUILDINGS LIKE SCHOOLS

    NYC BUILDINGS WITH COMMUNITY FALLOUT SHELTERS

LARGER VERSION OF RESEARCH OF A ATOMIC WEAPON DETONATION , TARGET NYC.