![]() New York City’s Tom Lee did an elegant utility sewing room with black-and-white-striped banquettes that could serve as beds. Paul of Los Angeles created a fun room, with a leafy town square painted on one wall, game tables and an area for editing home movies. You might shake your head at the Pollyanna-esque designs, but it’s hard not to admire the care with which decorators, designers and architects thought about how to make post-conflagration living normal.ĭorothy H. Members of the American Institute of Decorators took the task to heart. In 1959, the Civil Defense Agency decided to position the shelter not only as a bunker, but as a multipurpose extra room. Despite the hype, shelters were more scary than reassuring, and the government had a hard time selling the public on them. Ranging from corrugated metal tubes to lumber-clad root cellars to cast-concrete capsules, the reality was dark, tiny, airless and hot. Illustrations of shelter life invariably show Mother in pearls and pumps fussing about the quasi-kitchen, Father in a comfy chair with pipe in hand, and two youngsters playing nicely on the floor.īathrooms? Lighting? Fresh air? The cutaway views in these pictures belie the fact that basic shelters would have been grim living indeed. Within your secret haven, however, life would be almost normal. ![]() Close-quartered urban dwellers were on their own. Roy points out, the fallout shelter was a conceit of suburban life. ![]()
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