AA's "Fat Flier" Got Whole Row
Ashley Dupre On Tiger Woods' Babes: "At Least I Kept My Mouth Shut"
Same-Sex Marriage Blame Game Aims at Paterson, Addabbo
Wife Tries To Abort And Poison Husband's Lovechild
Rihanna's Random Airport Search
There is a super story in the NY Times about the recently discovered 1950s-1960s era bomb shelter discovered on the Manhattan side mooring of the Brooklyn Bridge. Work crews from the Department of Transportation stumbled upon the "dank and lightless room where the walls are lined with dusty boxes" while doing some routine inspection of the bridge, which just makes you wonder how routine inspection is if they missed it for five decades. But, anyway, it sounds really amazing, possibly more so because the city won't divulge where it's located (did city officials blindfold reporters and spin 'em around before they entered?):
For decades it waited in secret inside the masonry foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge, in a damp, dirty and darkened vault near the East River shoreline of Lower Manhattan: a stockpile of provisions that would allow for basic survival if New York City were devastated by a nuclear attack....Crackers and commodes - oh my! Experts don't think the shelter would have been much help in case of a nuclear fallout, but say that it probably made city officials feel better - ah, remember when everyone was scrambling around for duct tape after September 11? Goodness knows what people in 2056 will think when they find stashes of Red Bull, Cipro, and jump drives laying around in the other bomb shelter the city is probably secretly building. Anyway, Gothamist loves the "What's So Big About New York" poster in this photograph of the shelter, adding "Look for NYC-related cold war propaganda" to things we'd like to own.The most numerous items are the boxes of Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers. Printed in block letters, on each canister, was information about the number of pounds (6.75), the number of crackers per pound (62) and the minimum number of crackers per can (419). Joseph M. Vaccaro, a carpentry supervisor at the Transportation Department, estimated that there were 140 boxes of crackers — each with six cans, for a total of some 352,000 crackers...
Nearby were several dozen boxes with sealed bottles of Dextran, made by Wyeth Laboratories in Philadelphia. More mysterious were about 50 metal drums, made by United States Steel in Camden, N.J. According to the label, each was intended to hold 17.5 gallons and to be converted, if necessary, for "reuse as a commode." They are now empty.
Columbia professor and NYC historian Kenneth T. Jackson is quoted in the article ("What surprises me is that we have all these little nooks — that in this huge city with people crawling everywhere, we can find rooms still filled with stuff, 50 years after the fact."), and his book, The Encyclopedia of New York City, is a great resource. And do you have your Go bag?
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
Did they find Christopher Walken & Sissy Spacek?
"Did they find Christopher Walken & Sissy Spacek?"
...
You beat me to it...
I'm prepared for when the dead rise to eat the living. Who wants to bike to the catskills with me?
This was way before my time, but you gotta love Duck and Cover.
They're concerned about germs? I'm no bacteriologist, but I can't see the polio virus or salmonella surviving five decades inside a sealed container. Come on, guys, be brave. Take a bite. It won't kill you. But don't quote me on that. :-)
In this paranoid Bush/Bloomberg world where you're not allowed to take pictures around bridge and tunnel entrances (and even in the subways, if some cops have their way), I'm surprised we haven't gone back to this.Yeah, paranoid. it's not like someone's gonna try to blow up a bridge or something....oh wait. Well, it's not like they're gonna try to detonate bombs on the subway...hmmm, one sec. Yeah well, they'll never pull off demolishing something huge like a skyscraper.
Is that enough snark for one post?
It's not about whether the paranoia is justified. The bomb shelter shows us how pitifully lame our solutions are. Is someone targeting the subways? No doubt. But will keeping people from taking pictures in the subway somehow protect us? Not likely. And anyway, you're still more apt to die from a cold than from a terrorist attack.
Most of the Cold War "Civil Defense" programs were designed to make people think that nuclear war was something that you could live through. Covering yourself with a blanket really would have saved you when the Ruskie ICBMS were raining down.
Jonah,
Give it up. Rocknrope brings up the same lame arguments every time, just like he did when they started the ridiculously ineffective bag searches on the subway. Any terrorist with half a brain can easily work around all of these "security precautions," leaving only the innocent photographers inconvenienced. Yup, if Rocknrope had had his way, nobody would have been able to take pictures in or around the WTC and the towers would still be standing today. Wait, that makes no sense, does it?
Looks like someone is trying to be your friend Jonah....awwww, ain't it cute.
I don't understand why the big fuss now. The vaults they're referring to are located right next to the famed Brooklyn Banks where I grew up street skating in the mid '80's. We used to peek through the broken doors and actually had access on occassion to those storage rooms and have seen all that stuff they're dragging out. What's lame is how inefficent the city departments are in keeping track of all their storage facilities and their contents. They should open up the vaults and park their DOT vehicles in them instead of clogging up the banks for the skaters.