Riverdale, in the northwest Bronx, has been one of the few stable neighborhoods in a borough swept up in change starting in the late 1960s. Ushinski, an analyst at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who worked in the 1960s for the agency's predecessor, the Office of Civil Defense. "This is one building that slipped through the cracks," said Eugene J. And in space-scarce New York City, residents simply threw the stuff out themselves. The government eventually reclaimed most of the supplies, starting with the medical kits, which included drugs and syringes and the sedative phenobarbital. In the mid-1960s, more than 13,000 apartment buildings, houses and public structures in New York City took part in this short-lived stockpiling program. Long before the Reagan administration's "Star Wars" and its dream of intercepting Soviet missiles from space, government officials encouraged the construction of fallout shelters and, in some cases, stockpiled them with food, medicine, sanitation kits, gas masks, enough supplies to last at least two weeks. They were dusty snapshots of an America that, living with the specter of nuclear annihilation, planned to live on in subterranean redoubts. Unlike the ubiquitous yellow and black "Fallout Shelter" signs, however, the kits were rare artifacts of the Cold War, the tenant said. Who's worried about a nuclear attack now?" "It was time to throw this away," Lourenco said.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |