Gimme (Fallout) Shelter Mickey Z.

[Tace]

Photo credit: Mickey Z.

Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
July 26, 2020

As you may already know, I’m a ghost sign aficionado. I love discovering them and photographing them. Lately, thanks to Covid-19, I’ve been limited to a much smaller geographical area. Within that range, the primary ghost signs I encounter are those denoting my neighborhood’s long-defunct fallout shelters (see my latest photo above).

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President John F. Kennedy created the national fallout shelter system in 1961. Within two years, the five boroughs of New York City were home to about 18,000 officially designated shelters. This designation process was as faith-based as any religion I’ve ever encountered!

Local “civil defense agents” would survey a building to decide if it could survive (!) a nuclear explosion. Any building deemed indestructible would receive a government-issued placard to be mounted outside to guide anyone who happened to be fleeing from World War III. The ostensible belief was that the occupants of the shelter would face only minimal exposure to harmful fallout and could emerge safely once the radioactivity had decayed.

An October 1960 feature in Popular Mechanics explained fallout like this:

(more)

https://worldnewstrust.com/gimme-fallout-shelter-mickey-z