The results showed that at least 3,004 City of Milwaukee homes had family fallout shelters. In January 1961, the morning newspaper reported on a survey conducted by the Milwaukee Civil Defense office, which sent out 103,000 questionnaires and received 66,048 replies. It appears that many shelters were built in Milwaukee. This one incorporates a dozen living factors including entertainment, exercise, sleeping room for four, storage space, cooking units and water.' Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, a wide variety of ‘shelter’ family rooms will be shown.

While you’re on Google, search '1960s fallout shelter' and you’ll find lots of articles about homeowners unexpectedly finding old bomb shelters behind walls in their basements and buried in their gardens.īy early 1960, more than two-and-a-half years before the Cuban Missile Crisis amped up Cold War fears, the Milwaukee Sentinel wrote about proposed tax deductions for homeowners who spent money to build their own fallout shelters, and soon after classified ads began to appear in the local newspapers advertising masonry firms that listed fallout shelter construction among their services.īut the trend wasn’t a local one, of course, at the spring 1960 American Institute of Decorators at the Home Show, an exhibit offered a glimpse into 'The Family Room of Tomorrow,' a family fallout shelter that was designed to serve as an extra room for families to use regularly, but that was constructed to serve as a shelter.Īccording to an article in the Sentinel about the exhibit, 'done in cooperation with the U.S. Many also spent big money to build their own shelters at home. Today’s luxe bunker is a descendant of an earlier, starker Cold War-era craze: the residential fallout shelter.Īs the Cold War raged, as fears of nuclear war terrified, as Khrushchev railed at Nixon, pounded his shoe on the table and vowed to bury the United States, Americans sought safety, leading to community fallout shelters being built and stocked with fresh water, toilet paper and other necessities.

Google the phrase 'survivalist bunkers' and you’ll get a vast array of results, including articles about the phenomenon, websites for companies that build them and some rather astonishing photos of extremely elaborate ones – sometimes called luxury bunkers – that double, at least until the apocalypse, as wine cellars, man caves, rec rooms and more.

Luck in fallout shelter