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As a child of the Cold War, I remember well the feeling of vague dread associated with duck-and-cover air raid drills, the yellow and black “Fallout Shelter” signs and the frightening suspense of the Cuban missile crisis.
But there was one element of the Cold War picture that never evoked such feelings — the fallout shelter. As a generation relegated to a suburban underground of knotty pine-paneled basement rec rooms, I viewed the fallout shelter as the penultimate rec room: one in which you didn’t need to go upstairs (and confront the parents) for a glass of water, the bathroom facilities or a snack. By the demanding supply standards of fallout shelter design, everything you could possibly need in the event of nuclear armageddon was at your fingertips.
Although I never actually saw a fallout shelter — despite President Kennedy’s call for a fallout shelter in every home, Mad Men-style bars were a more sought-after amenity in the suburb in which I grew up — they never lost their fascination for me. I was especially intrigued by stories of fallout shelters lined with shelves of canned food that was still edible after decades. To my mind, these fell into the same category as discoveries of ancient Greek shipwrecks with cargoes of olive oil-filled amphorae, or still-viable seeds recovered from Chinese burial mounds.
But if I missed my chance to lay eyes on a real fallout shelter, I may get it again. According to Beckerman’s real estate clients, the latest thing in custom home amenities is a “safe room” with a panic button linked to the local PD and a “generator vault.” Why a generator vault? The purpose of the safe room, in case you rank among the uninitiated, is to protect occupants from a home invasion. If the generator were to be located at the side of the house, the home invaders could cut the electric lines, but if it’s located in a vault they can’t get to it.
One would imagine the occupants of a home with a safe room would be mobster canaries with prices on their heads. But no — these are ordinary suburban residents who are afraid that gangs of thugs are about to break down their doors. I have no idea what is fueling such paranoia, but I do know the trend reveals a startling downward spiral in the health of the national psyche when examined through the prism of luxury home amenities.
As a real estate industry observer, participant and PR professional, I have had the opportunity to examine such trends over the decades. Fallout shelters aside, the most popular post-war era amenities were focused on the automobile (the carport, the attached garage), the family (the rec room) or letting the good times roll. Besides the bar, for instance, ice cream fountains like the one at the corner sweet shop were a hot feature. By the 1970s, the zeitgeist had taken on a self-improvement theme. The “in” amenities were libraries with rolling stepladders and private gyms with gleaming arrays of exercise equipment. And by the go-go 1980s and 1990s, it was all about conspicuous consumption. Newly ascendant yuppies installed indoor putting greens, refrigerated rooms for fur storage and wrapping rooms to rival those of Macy’s at Christmastime.
In recent years, however, special rooms devoted to solitary occupations have become the trend, along with a descent back down to the subterranean level. There are basement home theaters and wine tasting rooms for the sampling of your private cache of rare vintages. I once saw a basement room with a single chair devoted to the contemplation of a work of art concealed behind a locked, remote-controlled display cabinet. I wondered what it concealed. The missing Vermeer from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum? A masterpiece of erotic art?
Viewed in a broader context, the safe room seems like the culmination of a larger cultural trend toward sequestration in hidden worlds that might be dubbed the “Second Life” effect after the popular online virtual world — in the case of safe rooms, one populated by vicious predators.
I confess that I am as fascinated by the idea of a safe room as by the idea of a fallout shelter. I could have used such a shrine to free-floating anxiety for purposes other than protection from home invasion: i.e. to hide out from a moody husband or a teenaged daughter in a snit. My dog would have loved it during thunderstorms. Who needs to pull the covers over their heads when they have a safe room with a panic button? The safe room is a fallout shelter come full circle, but now the threat isn’t borne on a missile nosecone, but inside our heads.
The question such a trend raises is, “Where is it headed?” Unless the purpose of such rooms takes on an even darker hue, it would seem that some détente of the national psyche is bound to eventually render the safe room — like the fallout shelter before it — irrelevant. In that case, I look forward to a brighter day when safe rooms are adapted to other uses. If we were to break through to the home theater and the wine cellar, for instance, we would have a contemporary iteration of the 1960s-era rec room — just in time for the anticipated millennial baby boomlet.
Tinny-tasting cans of string beans included.
