The 9 Best Kept Secrets In Brooklyn
The Brooklyn Bridge’s Cold War Bunker
The history of the Brooklyn Bridge is fascinating (perhaps that’s why it’s going to be a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe) and involves tragic deaths and a brilliant, enterprising woman, and, well, all sorts of made for the big screen details. But one cool factoid that will probably not be in the movie is this: the bridge contained a vault storing a stockpile of supplies in the event that New York had been hit with a nuclear attack. The New York Times reported in 2006 that “city workers were conducting a regular structural inspection of the bridge last Wednesday when they came across the cold-war-era hoard of water drums, medical supplies, paper blankets, drugs and calorie-packed crackers—an estimated 352,000 of them, sealed in dozens of watertight metal canisters and, it seems, still edible.” The public doesn’t have access to the bunker, but it’s kind of reassuring to know that New Yorkers have always been a very specific blend of both paranoid and prepared.
