This was the height of the Cold War - a nervous time when the Soviets had accelerated their nuclear-testing program over the Arctic and boasted the development of a 100-megaton “super fire bomb” that, according to the New York Times, was powerful enough to scorch a path of ruin from New York City to Poughkeepsie. (For those of you too young to recall, the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, was an ill-tempered chap who stood 5’2” and wore cheap suits, and as such could be crudely considered the original “Little Rocket Man.”) Fallout shelters were the rage then. Architects were awarded contracts to design model fallout shelters that would accommodate 50 or more people. In the late summer of 1961, almost a full year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, the federal government announced that White Plains was chosen, along with Baltimore and Washington, DC, as a “test city” for a program called the Atom Shelter Study. Given the current spike in anxiety over imminent global obliteration, it seems appropriate to note this dubious distinction and to hark back to a less cynical age - a time when Americans actually believed (or hoped) they could survive a nuclear attack by hiding in a crude backyard dugout stocked with canned peaches, crackers and Spam. Ignorance of such a trivial fact is excusable. Westchester is known for many “firsts,” but few are aware that the county seat of White Plains was the first city in America to get an official, government-issue fallout shelter sign.
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