Fallout Five Zero

Editor’s Note – If You Tried to Contact US and Got No Response, I Apologize and Here’s Why

Posted on December 18, 2025 by Fallout Five Zero

I don’t like to take up space with non-fun posts unless I have to, but for anyone who has reached out using the contact form recently and did not get a response, we at Fallout Five Zero are truly sorry.

When you use the contact form, that generates an e-mail that comes to us, and somehow the email address it comes from had been blocked, which pushed all contact communications into a spam folder. When we recently went to check that, it appeared there were messages in their from fine site visitors like you, but they were automatically deleted and lost when the folder was opened. All efforts were made to recover them, but this was to no avail.

So, if you tried to contact us recently with any tips or requests, please do so again!

Thank you and Happy Holidays from the staff at FFZ

In The City of Presidents (and Nearby), Some Signs Lead to JFK

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Fallout Five Zero

A question came in from someone who visited the site asking if a Fallout Shelter sign that had been on this apartment building at 200 Presidents Lane in Quincy was still there.

Quincy is a city of around 101,000 residents next to Boston, and known as the “City of Presidents” due to it being the birthplace of both John Adams and John Quincy Adams.

A visit revealed that the sign was still in fact there, on the left side of the building.

Although a straight-on shot was not possible due to the location of the sign, and the capacity is faded, a quick zoom-in looks like it reads 150.

A chat with a nice resident who was outside revealed that what was the shelter area in the basement is now laundry, and no interior signs remain in the building.

Not too far away, another exterior sign was seen at the First Presbyterian Church on Franklin Street.

The first number of the capacity was missing but the shadow appears to have been a 6, for a capacity of 60.

A quick walk around the building showed a set of stairs down to a basement door, but no other signs.

So, why the reference to JFK? It was President John F. Kennedy who, in July 1961, proposed a public Fallout Shelter program in the United States that would lead to the National Fallout Shelter Survey in September of the same year, and the eventual posting of these very signs (which were created by the Department of Defense, not Kennedy himself).

Just over the Quincy line is the Donald E. Ross School in the town of Braintree, and one exterior sign remained on the outside of the building.

Although Quincy had far more shelter locations and still has many signs up within the city, this is one of (if not the last) known exterior sign in the town of Braintree. The only other recent sign was at the St. Francis of Assisi School on Washington Street, but it was removed by 2012.

Pictures taken on August 16, 2025 and owned by Fallout Five Zero.

Special thanks to the unknown resident of 200 Presidents Lane for providing information about the building.

The Savings Was Wall Space

Posted on August 16, 2025August 16, 2025 by Fallout Five Zero

During a recent out-of-town trip to Sanford, Maine, a city of just over 20,000 residents in Southern Maine, and close to the New Hampshire border, this Partners Bank, formerly the Sanford Institution for Savings, sported the shadow of an exterior Fallout Shelter sign.

It appears from Google Maps that, although the bank remained Sanford Institution for Savings until sometime after 2018, the sign was removed between 2011 and 2015 before the bank changed hands (screenshot below for reference).

Although wall space was saved, it’s doubtful the sign was.

© 2025 Fallout Five Zero

Images taken on August 13, 2025 and owned by Fallout Five Zero. Screenshot from and owned by Google Maps

And Just Like That, It Was Gone

Posted on February 3, 2025 by Fallout Five Zero

The picture on the left, taken around 2011, shows an exterior Fallout Shelter sign on the Hayward Place side of 600 Washington Street, a multi-use building on the edge of Chinatown.

The picture on the right was taken on February 2, 2025, and shows the sign has been removed. However, the sign had just been there a week or so before this picture was taken, so the removal was recent and the sign remained into 2025.

600 Washington Street was once a department store and formerly the Cinerama Theater, which remains abandoned inside the building. There were once 3 exterior Fallout Shelter signs, one on each side of the building except for the rear. There were also several interior Fallout Shelter signs, at least two of which remained as of 2017. As has been previously reported, time and age are not kind to these signs and many continue to be removed. Since this site began in 2014, 40 or more signs have been removed in Boston alone.

Fallout Five Zero will continue to promote their history, however, today and beyond.

A Then Controversial Figure Walks Past A Once Controversial Sign

Posted on January 14, 2025January 14, 2025 by Fallout Five Zero

In this photograph taken by famed photographer Stanley Forman in September 1978, singer and controversial figure Anita Bryant walks out of the Copley Plaza Hotel and past a Fallout Shelter sign while in Boston to rally for Howard Phillips, who was running for U.S. Senate at the time.

Anita Bryant had been an outspoken figure and was specifically an opponent of gay rights. According to Mr, Forman, she had to be escorted by Boston Police to various events in Boston due to threats. Phillips ended up finishing fourth in the Democratic primary for Senate that year.

As for the Fallout Shelter sign, it had its own controversy when it was first developed in 1961 because many anti-nuclear activists believed it promoted the idea of war over disarmament and gave Americans a false sense of security. In many places in the US, including San Francisco and right at Harvard University in Cambridge (which Phillips attended), the signs were torn down multiple times. The one in this photo and many others, however, lasted many years beyond (it is now gone), and hundreds of signs are still up throughout the US, although they are coming down as time passes and buildings are rehabbed or demolished. Many were also removed over the past decade due to city governments not wanting people to think shelters still exist or can be used. New York City specifically took all remaining signs off their public school buildings in 2017 for the same reason.

© 2025 Fallout Five Zero

Photograph taken and owned by Stanley Forman and used with permission. Special thanks to Mr. Forman for use of the photo. More of his work can be found at his website https://stanleyformanphotos.com/

The Roxbury Papers, Part 2: New Numbers And A Missing Page

Posted on September 6, 2024 by Fallout Five Zero

roxburycivildefense1970

Back in 2017, I posted a series of papers from a book, its name then unknown, I had found while doing research at the Boston Public Library and called them the Roxbury Papers. These three pages had a list of Fallout Shelters in Roxbury from a survey done in the area and included both shelters that existed and some that were never known to be marked and wouldn’t have qualified as adequate shelter areas under OCD rules for capacity (the minimum was space of 50 persons).

While doing online research through archive.org, I found that very book and finally its name.

Roxbury: Past, Present, Future

The book was published in 1970 by Pauline Gavlak and a group of nurses from the Boston College Graduate School, Department of Nursing, and was a study of the area including population, transportation, healthcare, public safety, and civil defense.

Until I found it again online, I didn’t know there was a forward page on civil defense in Boston, which outlined how many shelters Boston had at the time of writing, and how many of those shelters were in Roxbury.

Ms. Gavlak and her associates wrote that [in 1970], Boston had 1,794 shelters licensed, and of those 850 were stocked. Roxbury had 146 shelters out of that number, and all (including the locations not deemed suitable as shelters) were listed on the survey.

These are up from the 1965 numbers of which I had the last data, and as of this writing, the 1970 data is the last data available for shelters licensed and stocked in the City of Boston.

Many of the shelters listed on the 3 pages no longer have any exterior or any known interior signs.

Document owned by the Boston Public Library and accessed on September 6, 2024, through archive.org. The link below opens in a new window directly to the civil defense information page, and the list of shelters in Roxbury follows on the pages after that.

Roxbury: Past, Present, Future

Out of Town Mini Series: The Shadows of Tennessee

Posted on August 1, 2024September 18, 2025 by Fallout Five Zero

During a recent trip to Tennessee, FFZ and family visited both Knoxville and Nashville.

Knoxville, a small city three hours east of larger Nashville, once had “hundreds” of shelters, according to this 2018 news story from NBC affiliate WBIR, which aired shortly after the Hawaii ballistic missile scare.

However, during this visit, not one active shelter sign was seen in the city; only shadows where former signs once hung.

East Tennessee History Center, S. Gay Street & Clinch Avenue

YMCA Building, Locust and West Clinch Sts

YWCA, West Clinch avenue

Studio Four Design, 414 Clinch Avenue

BMA Architects, 505 Market Street

Residential Building, 531 South Gay Street

Former Bank Building, 612 South Gay Street

Residential Building, Clinch Avenue and Worlds Fair Park Drive

Although this is only a small sampling of buildings within the downtown area, these shadows show what was once a decent shelter system in Knoxville. The news story mentioned above even shows a Community Shelter Plan from Knoxville in 1969, and part of the story takes place in the news station’s former shelter, which was in the basement of their building.

As for Nashville, many older buildings were seen that were the right size and architecture for having possibly been shelters, but not one sign was seen within that city either, and only one lone shadow on this building on Chestnut Street near the Nashville guitar billboard.

However, a family member visited Nashville in September 2025, and found one more building (The Waverly Belmont School) that had a prominent sign shadow, and was kind enough to send photos

When it comes to remembering the civil defense program, the public fallout shelter was a very large part of that history. As signs have and continue to come down, these shadows offer a small glimpse into the program’s past and offer a sometimes ugly but prominent reminder of where these shelters once were.

There’s likely a good country music lyric to end with, but we won’t.

All photos above taken and owned by Fallout Five Zero

Photos of Waverly Belmont School taken and sent by family member and now owned by Fallout Five Zero

Trading Signs

Posted on July 17, 2024July 17, 2024 by Fallout Five Zero

The former Lowell Trade and Vocational High School was a trade school in Lowell, Massachusetts. It closed sometime in the mid-1970s and there is now a Greater Lowell Technical High School in Tyngsborough, Massachusetts, which serves several communities in the area.

The first picture of the former Lowell TVHS, taken in 1964, shows an older pointed “CD Shelter” sign on the left-hand corner of the building.

In the second photo of a building entrance, the more modern Fallout Shelter sign is seen in a photo taken in 1972.

Lowell is a city of under 115,000 residents northwest of Boston and once had numerous buildings marked as Fallout Shelters, many of which were educational and dormitory buildings on the University of Massachusetts Lowell campus. Many of the signs in the city have since been removed, and it is unknown if the buildings above still exist.

Pictures above are excerpted from the 1964 and 1972 yearbooks of the Lowell Trade and Vocational High School, accessed through archive.org

Makes You Wonder What The Other Sign Would Have Looked Like

Posted on January 28, 2024 by Fallout Five Zero

The National Fallout Shelter Survey, which began in September of 1961, brought the Army Corps of Engineers and civilian architects and engineers who were put through Civil Defense training classes around the country to survey existing buildings to see if they would be feasible as public Fallout Shelters.

To be selected as a shelter, the building had to meet three criteria:

-Protection Factor of 40 (meaning a person would receive 1/40th the radiation inside the shelter than he or she would outside without protection. Noted below and in official documents as “PF.”)
-Room for at least 50 persons
-10 square feet of space per person

Once the survey was underway, buildings that were identified (and licensed if they were private) were marked with the official Fallout Shelter sign, and in some cases stocked with civil defense rations and equipment. As we have featured on our site in the past, the first shelter marked in Massachusetts was The Massachusetts State House in a ceremony that took place on November 5, 1962.

However, this document above (and linked below) from a 1963 shelter study done by the Stanford Research Institute for Boston shows that the original plan by civil defense officials was to only mark shelters with a PF of 100 or more, and mark any shelter with less than a PF of 100 with a differing sign, possibly with something saying “unmarked refuge,”

In the 155-page study, the difference between PF 100 and PF 40 shelters is discussed, as well as the percent of which type of shelter would be occupied day and night and the fact that the shelters that were stocked were at least PF 100. There are also maps showing where potential shelters in Boston were, although it is not differentiated by specific location, just dots marking potential shelter sites within various Boston neighborhoods.

It is interesting to know that we may have seen a sign other than the one we are used to (and this site is dedicated to), though I’m glad they decided to stick with the one.

Document retrieved on January 28, 2024, from archive.org

The Sound Around Town: Sometimes Wanted, Sometimes Not

Posted on November 7, 2023November 7, 2023 by Fallout Five Zero

This photo taken of the West Brookfield, Massachusetts town hall on October 29, 2023, shows a Federal Signal air raid siren on the roof. A similar one was on the roof of a building in nearby Warren, Mass.

This news story from the Telegram & Gazette, written on October 13, 2020, says that the siren had been active and was being sounded at the request of town residents at 6:15 p.m. each day, but malfunctioned one morning and sounded inadvertently at 5 a.m. It was then disconnected when this occurred, and it is unknown if it was ever reconnected.

Many town halls in Massachusetts, including Dedham and Provincetown, once had sirens on their roofs, probably due to those buildings being the highest in those towns. Both of those have since been removed.

Photo taken on October 29, 2023 and owned by Fallout Five Zero