GIMME SHELTER

Going from shoot to shoot via the subway in New York's boroughs often necessitates GPS. Earlier this week, I needed to travel to the Red Hook section of Brooklyn for an episode of The Americans. As always, I did a preview of the route on Google Maps. Since my Moto G5 was charging, I used my wife's iPad -- which wound up giving me more information than I had anticipated.

Yikes! What year is this? For reasons only the iPad can explain -- perhaps it's more current events-savvy than I suspected -- we now know where the fallout shelters are.

There are no exact addresses -- just the general areas and cross-streets. This won't do us a lot of good if we're out and about without the iPad, which is, like, every time we leave the house. Looks like the wife better start making room for it in her purse.

Too, we should probably stick to Manhattan, since Brooklyn, despite having the fourth largest population in the U.S., appears to be pretty skimpy when it comes to helping its citizens survive a nuclear attack. How do you hipsters in Williamsburg feel now?

While it appears that my Upper East Side neighborhood is lousy with shelters, the closest is at 73rd & 1st. This barely gives us the 10 minutes required to get there either by foot or subway. Since my then-pregnant wife found the time to wash, curl and dry her hair after her water broke, I don't see us surviving a surprise package postmarked Pyongyang. 

 

By enlarging the image, we see that most of the Upper East Side shelters are near a few of New York's most prominent hospitals -- like interns are going to be able to careen every patient through panicked streets on stretchers before the bomb hits. This is also close to the ritzy Sutton Place neighborhood, where you can find Bed Bath & Beyond and high-ballers like the United Nations Secretary-General. So unless we're looking for non-stick pans or taking up international business with Antonio Guterres at zero hour, we are again out of luck. But at least now we know for a fact who are considered more expendable than others.                             

Would you eat 60 year-old survival crackers anyway?

Not that it really matters. Many of those little fallout shelter signs, so ubiquitous even in the little town where I grew up, are coming down across New York. Not because we're suddenly living in a worldwide Utopia. It's just that terrorists and (theoretical) portable dirty bombs have made fallout shelters useless relics of the 1960s, like TV rabbit ears, asbestos, and Jell-O Vegetable salads. Oh, and Survival Crackers. Which is probably what you'd call people who think they can survive nuclear blasts.

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