“H-BOMB? SURVIVE,” bellowed text below an image of a mushroom cloud in the 1961 ad, which touted Sunset Conejo and The Dales tracts as Southern California’s “only residential developments with fallout protection.”īuyers could opt in for “only $1,100,” the ad said, equating the optional shelters with basics like “your range, oven or disposal.” The starting price for the houses from developer Richard Doremus’ Exhibit Homes was less than $30,000.
An ad in the Los Angeles Times wove concerns about nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union into the fabric of everyday suburbia. Two Thousand Oaks neighborhoods developed in the 1960s featured nuclear bomb shelters as an option for safety-conscious home buyers. The skull and femurs lying at the base of a shaft roughly 10 feet below a Thousand Oaks garage are plastic, perhaps leftovers from some Halloween tableau.īut the entrance they adorn - to an underground fallout shelter - stands as a reminder of Cold War fears of nuclear destruction that were hauntingly real.
Watch Video: Peer into a Conejo Valley home's Cold War past
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