began to forget about the safety shelters, eventually becoming an obscure factoid for most of the public. For example, Boston’s Faneuil Hall has served as a meeting space for city officials for hundreds of years, but it was available as a shelter for 100 people in the early 1960s.Īs threats from the Soviet Union died down in the 1990s, the U.S. “Many homeowners, communities and business firms can and will provide more adequate and better located shelter space for their own needs.”īunkers today are sporadically found in schools, apartment buildings and popular tourist spots around the city. “The Federal Government is moving forward to bring into operation fallout shelter space for large groups of people under very austere conditions,” Kennedy said in a press release to the Civil Defence Committee of the Governor’s Conference on Oct. All across the United States, resources were funneled to line basements of everyday buildings with fallout shelter procedures to try and shield people from the worst of potential nuclear blasts. Kennedy urged Americans to build nuclear fallout shelters in the event of nuclear catastrophe. Other shelters have lost their key black and yellow signage on exterior and interior walls, making the buildings that were equipped to handle nuclear debris of the 1900s difficult to track after the 20th century throughout time. (Map icon graphic provided by Jud McCranie) However, some citizens have tracked and submitted their findings of these historical structures through Fallout Five Zero. From popular landmarks to apartment buildings, nuclear fallout shelters have transformed from federally designated safe havens for nuclear power in the mid-1900s to everyday buildings that millions of people unknowingly walk by and use around Massachusetts today.

Explore the nuclear fallout shelters in Massachusetts (Boston and Quincy), according to data from Fallout Five Zero, a website chronicling public shelters in the northeast.

Where are fallout shelters located