Are Cold War Sites Worth Preserving?
Empty symbols of fear become museums.
By Elizabeth Benjamin | Online Only | Oct. 17, 2001
From this windowless building, the Air Force scanned the skies for missiles.
Credit: Susan Zimet
The building known simply as "the block house" sits tucked into a far corner of Stewart International Airport in New Windsor, N.Y. Despite its considerable size—four stories and more than 120,000 square feet—it is easy to overlook the windowless concrete cube with no distinguishing features except a single beige stripe.
But from behind its bland facade, during the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Air Force kept a close watch on American skies, wary of a possible Soviet air attack.
When it opened in 1958, its official name was the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Direction Center, called SAGE by the Air Force personnel who worked there when Stewart was an active military base. It housed part of the military's first major computer-based command and control system, a precursor to today's Internet.
When, in the late 1960s, the center's technology became obsolete, unable to detect the more sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles, the Air Force pulled the plug on the SAGE building, which has sat, empty and deteriorating, ever since.
Several months ago, the structure drew the interest of two residents of the nearby town of New Paltz, who are now working to turn it into a Cold War museum. Susan Zimet, 47, co-director of the Hudson Valley Media Arts Center, discovered the building while scouting for a sound stage. Intrigued, she called her friend Karl Rodman, a 65-year-old businessman and president of the educational travel company Hudson Valley Tours. Together, they hatched the idea for the Cold War/Peace Museum.
"People need to see this and know what was going on right in their own back yards during that time," Zimet says. "At any given moment we could find ourselves back in that situation again."
To pay for feasibility-and-concept studies for the museum, Zimet and Rodman are trying to raise $200,000. They envision an institution that would not only explain the SAGE system but also examine the Cold War's impact on life in the United States and the Soviet Union. They might also include a movie theater that would show continuous screenings of movies like Dr. Strangelove as well as a life-size replica of a back-yard bomb shelter.
The significance of such sites has increased since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Rodman said. "We've entered a new kind of Cold War psychology," he says. "The lessons of that earlier war need to be examined and understood."
The would-be museum is among a growing number of efforts to preserve sites related to the time when fear of nuclear annihilation gripped America. Several museums already exist. In the coastal hills of Marin County, Calif., visitors to Fort Barry, operated by the National Park Service, can view three disarmed Hercules missiles in a cavernous underground battery. The Titan Missile Museum in Sahuarita, Ariz., designated a National Historic Landmark in 1994, features the nation's only remaining intact Titan missile site (there were once 53). The Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, N.M., the only congressionally chartered museum of nuclear science and history, displays replicas of the world's first atomic weapons.
Some museums are still works in progress. The U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, recently broke ground for a 190,000-square-foot addition that will include a Cold War gallery and missile silo to hold its collection of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The new space is expected to open in 2003.
Francis Gary Powers Jr., son of the U-2 pilot whose plane was shot down over Russia in 1960, will soon open a museum on a former Nike missile site in Lorton, Va. A group on Long Island is working to save the nation's last intact Air Force radar tower and antenna on state-owned land at Montauk Point. The federal government is restoring another former Nike missile site at Fort Hancock, N.J., with plans to turn it into a national park.
"Cold War sites are newer, so they're maybe not quite as fully appreciated as they will be in future," says Cold War researcher Don Bender, who is advising the National Park Service on the restoration at Fort Hancock.
Indeed, people interested in rescuing Cold War sites find it difficult to raise interest and money for old missile bases, radar towers, and concrete command centers with architectural styles than can best be described as utilitarian. Such structures were designed to be functional, not beautiful.
Also, many of these properties have been stripped of the electronics that made them distinctive. Today, three of the New Windsor SAGE building's four floors are dark and empty. On its ground floor, a small company produces chocolate lollipops.
Map from the fourth floor command center
Credit: Zimet
All that is left of its cutting-edge technology are some Plexiglass maps of the East Coast and a dusty, massive air-conditioning unit that once cooled two identical computer systems, each with 50,000 vacuum tubes. Data from far-flung radar sites were transmitted over phone lines to computer consoles at this and 21 other SAGE centers, where Air Force personnel watched for enemy planes. If aircraft neared, remote-controlled surface-to-air missiles could be deployed at the touch of a button. Although the military test-ran many simulated attacks, the missiles were never fired.
SAGE employees called the computer room "the blue room" because of the low light that reduced the glare from hundreds of computer screens. It was typically smoke-filled; consoles included built-in cigarette lighters and ashtrays, a small luxury for the men who sat, eyes glued to radar screens, for hours at a time.
"The SAGE computer was a marvel not seen in civilian circles," said Chris McWilliams, a retired Air Force major who worked as a radar operator at the building from 1957 to 1960. "Compared to the older manual radar consoles, the SAGE consoles looked like something out of Buck Rogers."
In its day, the system featured the largest and most expensive real-time computer program ever built. Designed by MIT's Lincoln Laboratories and constructed by I.B.M., it pioneered computer features now considered standard, including dial-up telephone modem and the mouse. In a rudimentary version of today's point-and-click technology, SAGE operators pointed a "light gun" at the computer screen and pulled its trigger.
Zimet and Rodman hope the building's history and contributions to modern computer engineering will draw visitors. They would like to integrate their museum with other local historic military sites, such as the nearby United States Military Academy at West Point, which attracts some 2.5 million visitors annually. Although they realize it will take millions of dollars to fund exhibits, Zimet and Rodman are convinced the Cold War/Peace Museum will be created.
"The goal is to have visitors walk out with their hair standing up on the back of their necks," Zimet says.
Elizabeth Benjamin is a freelance writer in Cambridge, Mass.
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