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Ten years later, the county’s Civil Defense shelter officer told the Democrat and Chronicle there were 584 shelters with enough room for 376,534 people. By those accounts, there were anywhere from 400 to 600.Ī Civil Defense newsletter from January 1964 read that there were 390 “fully-stocked shelters” in the county that could sustain 192,130 people for two weeks.

A county spokesperson acknowledged that the county stopped maintaining public shelters after what was known as the federal Office of Civil Defense was dissolved in the 1970s, and that a list of shelter locations has been lost to time.Īrchives of news articles and Civil Defense newsletters that were issued quarterly offer the best estimates of the number of shelters. There is no telling precisely how many public fallout shelters existed in Monroe County.

There were hundreds of public fallout shelters around Rochester in the 1960s and 1970s, including one in the apartment building that now houses Turcott's Taproom on Monroe Avenue.

The few signs still hanging around have been corroded by rust and time, and the spaces they advertised - once stocked with foodstuffs, first aid kits, canned water, toilet paper, and bedding - were long ago repurposed into storage rooms for who knows what.

Today, those signs are seen as kitschy relics of a different era, although a new poll conducted by The Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that close to half of Americans say they are 'very concerned' that Russia would directly target the U.S. They were affixed to hundreds of buildings in and around the city - schools, offices, apartment complexes, warehouses - that the Army Corps of Engineers had determined offered the right amount of “radiation shielding.”īack then, it was the Russians and the Cuban Missile Crisis that had pushed the Cold War simmer to a boil, and those yellow and black metal signs were seen as an ominous emblem of the times. Sixty years before Russian President Vladimir Putin raised the specter of nuclear war with his invasion of Ukraine - and President Joe Biden told Americans not to worry about it - iconic yellow and black signs marked “Fallout Shelter” began popping up in the streets of Rochester.

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