A panorama of the New York skyline viewed from across the Hudson River stunned visitors at the midcentury McMansion built for corporate entrepreneur Girard Henderson by Texas contractors Julian (“Jay”) and Kenneth Swayze. Beyond mere luxury, the home granted its owner uncanny powers. Surveying the sweeping panorama from behind floor-to-ceiling glass, he could conjure sunrise, sunset, or the ghostly glow of moonlight on water with just the flip of a switch. Henderson’s swank residence, with its exposed beam ceiling, backyard swimming pool, and spectacular vistas (Manhattan skyscrapers from the living room, the Golden Gate Bridge from a bedroom) lay buried beneath a secluded ridgetop in the Colorado Rockies, fifteen miles from Boulder and 9,500 feet above sea level. 

“Mountain Home,” as its contractors called it, employed a novel building technique that they named “ship-in-a-bottle.”  Constructing the hideaway, Jay Swayze explained, “required  removing a mountain top, pouring the concrete shell, and then  replacing the mountain top.” (1) Within the resulting cast-in-place  capsule, builders assembled a single-story wood-frame dwell ing complete with garden patio and backyard swimming pool.  Throughout Henderson’s home, windows opened onto a narrow  corridor separating the “exterior” wall from a concrete retaining  wall, the latter adorned with trompe-l’oeil murals that defied  Cartesian space and celestial time. They also confounded traditional distinctions between inside and outside, which, as Beatriz Colomina observes, “were not simply abandoned  here: they were made strange.” (2) The hybrid structure redefined linguistic conventions. “Outer/outside,” according to Swayze,  referred to “anything not enclosed in the shell.” The terms  “out-of-doors, back yard, front yard, patio, courtyard, garden,  swimming pool” all denoted “areas inside the shell.” A newspa per reporter proposed a more poetic inversion, declaring that  Swayze raised “castles in the sky… strictly below the turf.” (3) Henderson’s status as corporate visionary and one of America’s  wealthiest men made possible his recruitment into a forgotten  avant-garde celebrated by Swayze as the “pioneers of modern underground living.” (4) 

As a luxury homebuilder, Swayze endeavored to give each customer a dwelling with “a certain magical quality.” His success with Mountain Home prompted Henderson to acquire a 51% share of the Underground World Home Corporation and to finance the project to take sub-grade living mainstream. The anticipated breakthrough venture, a ten-room model home sunk fifteen feet below Flushing Meadows in Queens, debuted at New York’s 1964-65 World’s Fair. The Underground World Home pavilion recapitulated Swayze’s ship-in-a bottle and its enabling technologies as the support infrastructure of security and comfort during insecure times. The home’s “snorkel” supplied filtered air, electric motors powered a sewage lift and ejector, and “murals of light” like those used at Mountain Home lined the 2500 sq. ft. “outdoor” garden patio. A concrete deck carried on 18” steel girders supported a dead load of one thousand tons of soil, providing insulation from the outside world. Consumer luxuries could be truly savored in this serene isolation: one might, for example, “experience for the first time the full range of sensations that today’s sensitive stereo systems are able to produce.” Glitzy opulence ruled this subterranean realm. “Crystal beads and pendants are everywhere,” noted a New York Times reporter. “They even form a combination canopy and chandelier in the master bedroom.” Half a million fairgoers descended into the model home the year it debuted. According to Swayze, they “declared again and again, ‘This is a dreamworld.’”

Swayze’s novel homebuilding formula also suggested a solution to the issue of claustrophobic enclosure. Home windows would open onto the vertical plenum as a source of fresh air. Why not have them supply light and simulated views as well? Landscape murals painted on the concrete retaining wall opposite window openings could extend past the frame, creating views that shifted as one moved through the house. A research trip to the corporate campus of the GE Lighting and Electrical Institute near Cleveland, Ohio supplied the technical know-how to fully realize the brainstorm.

Swayze devised a illumination system using multiple fluorescent tubes, each producing light of a different color temperature, mounted to the underside of the concrete deck outside window openings. Light switches turned on different combinations of tubes to simulate various times of day, including a UV-emitting blacklight for night sky effects. Since luminescent paints were not yet commercially available, rendering celestial objects involved a concocting a fluorescent pigment from phosphor extracted from standard lighting tubes. Completing the illusion, air circulation through windows opening onto the plenum would cause curtains to stir.

Given the synergies between these boldly reimagined building elements, Swayze made a proprietary claim for the formula. After years of delay, the US Patent Office in 1966 registered his application, #3,227,061, under the generic title “Underground Building.” Swayze had something catchier in mind. Combining the words “atomic” and “habitat,” he dubbed his invention the Atomitat. Swayze unveiled working drawings for the prototype at the Plainview Savings and Loan Association in 1961 as part of his application for a $80,000 mortgage -- well over four times the price of an average new home in the US. The bank’s directors approved the loan before Swayze could even leave the building. One year later, Jay and his wife Ruth, along with their teenage daughters Cheryl and Nancy, became the test subjects of the first house to meet all Department of Civil Defense specifications for underground fallout shelters.

Their timing seemed flawless. On the morning of October 16, 1962, Kennedy learned that classified aerial reconnaissance photos of Cuba revealed Soviet medium-range missiles arrayed at newly built launch pads. Seven days later, Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address threatening US retaliation against the Soviet Union should any warhead be launched. Castro rejected US site inspections in advance, asserting that the missiles were there to defend against American aggression. Fearing that war was imminent, panic buying across the US stripped market shelves of non-perishable foods. Basements were stocked as ad hoc fallout shelters. School children endured “duck and cover” classroom drills.

Hollywood tapped into the mood with Panic in the Year Zero, a B-grade thriller about a family camping trip turned life-and-death ordeal as A-bombs fall on distant cities. Fighting off violence triggered by social collapse, they ride out the madness in a cavern. “In the nuclear age, the sheltering cave looked less like fantasy and more like a necessity,” cold war exhibition curator Jane Pavitt notes.16 The specter of post-apocalyptic refuge permeated another fantasy shelter, a 1962 dollhouse marketed by the Marx Toy Company. Its appended concrete block vault featured open shelving crowded with canned food and first-aid supplies, a hand cranked air raid siren, and a wall calendar to mark the slow passage of days spent in isolation. These cultural data points, along with hundreds of others, map the psychic urgency of survivalist space at a moment of geopolitical trauma, an emotional reality easily missed when Atom-age artifacts are viewed through the lens of postmodern irony.

The timeliness of Swayze’s hybrid of ranch home and bunker allowed him to turn the world’s first Atomitat into an ad-hoc model home. An opening volley of newspaper reports brought 35,000 curious visitors to Plainview for tours of the 2,800 sq. ft., ten-room, two-bath home ensconced within its 3,400 sq. ft. concrete shell and buried under three feet of Texas red clay. Located in an otherwise unremarkable suburban neighborhood, his lot confronted the street with a two-car garage, but no house. A closer look revealed an entry door bracketed by twin garage roll-ups. It led to a stairway leading to a landing and lead-lined steel portal, closed in times of duress. From the stair landing, a 180 degree turn (to block line-of-sight gamma radiation) and a final flight down revealed an unexpected tableau. A trove of middle-class domestic signifiers now came into view: a façade accented with board-and-batten siding, a diamond-paned front door flanked by brick planter boxes, and a double-hung kitchen window beneath a shingled roof parapet. Proceeding along quarry tile pavers, visitors entered a living-dining area carpeted in gold nylon wall-to-wall. Beyond, a back porch running the length of the home repeated the entry’s simulation of outdoor space.

This stage set for gracious underground living proved irresistible to journalists. Syndicated dailies across the country ran public interest stories. Life magazine featured photographs of the Swayze family welcoming readers down for a taste of the good life. Guests at a subterranean garden party were shown relaxing with drinks while daughter Cheryl, obeying teenage tradition, retreated to her bedroom to read beneath a window, her book illuminated by artificial sunlight streaming from a painted landscape. Jay Swayze led a televised guided tour for the Arabic-speaking viewers of Ikhtartu Lakum (I Chose for You), a program produced by the US Information Agency as cold war propaganda and distributed to audiences in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Aden. Director Joy Royster explained that the segment showed how American ingenuity had proven that “people don’t have to live on top of the ground to live comfortably,” a message of questionable utility in America’s battle to win hearts and minds. The gush of Atomitat publicity quickly found its way to the CEO of Avon Products, Girard B. Henderson. Reclusive in temperament, libertarian in politics, and one of the richest men in the US, he saw the domestic bunker as an ideal match for his luxe, hermetic lifestyle. Henderson became Swayze’s most important client, not only commissioning an underground retreat in the Colorado Rockies and a similar town home in Las Vegas, but also underwriting the million-dollar cost of an Atomitat at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.

Model Home of the Dreadful Future

In the summer of 1963, The New York World’s Fair Corporation negotiated the lease of a 15,000 square foot lot with Alexander Dawson Inc., a New Jersey legal entity fully owned by Henderson and named after his deceased father. The exhibitor promised “a unique home” built fourteen feet below grade; it would feature “devices to allow occupants to ‘change’ the seasons of the year and the time of day merely by adjusting a number of dials.” Fairground commissioners found a place for the concession in the Transportation Section where soil conditions were more favorable than elsewhere on the Flushing Meadows site, given its creation from coal ash waste and street sweepings used as marsh infill half a century earlier. 

The Underground World Home pavilion had to entice visitors into an attraction that lacked any street-level presence whatsoever. The design solution employed a glazed cube, its cantilevered roof supported by a central cluster of piers around which a spiral stairway unwound downward. A welcoming area offered displays about the technology and benefits of modern subterranean living, hoping to induce the curious to pay one dollar (half price for children) to experience it for themselves. A dozen young female guides, each “with a head full of facts about subsurface living,” according to a New York Times reporter, stood at the ready to conduct twenty-minute tours offered in fifteen languages.

Descending via stairway or an adjacent elevator, visitors entered the three-bedroom house through a protective steel portal that opened onto its single-layer slice of suburban home façade, precisely as at the Plainview Atomitat. Double entry doors opened to reveal sumptuous white-and-gold interiors by Ft. Lauderdale designer Marilynn Motto. Inside, bookshelves proffered titles like Our New Life with the Atom and Foreign Policy Without Fear. A Miami newspaper marveled of Motto’s efforts: “Her designs are enough to calm a subterranean dweller during an H-bombing.” As with Swayze’s previous underground homes, the pièce de résistance was saved for last. Substantially expanded from earlier versions to accommodate a swarm of sightseers, the back patio featured another panoramic “mural of light.” Plastic wisteria crept over trellis columns framing a rolling landscape dotted with stately homes and formal gardens. After enjoying “dial-a-view” simulations of daytime, sunset, and a starry night sky, visitors resurfaced for one last sales pitch. The souvenir-hungry could collect a free brochure containing contact information for the Underground World Homes Corporation, purchase a book about the house, or buy a commemorative edition LP of Greatest Hits by the Johnny Mann Singers. It featured a newly commissioned number, “At the Bottom of the Fair,” and jacket art depicting jet setters using the Atomitat patio as a dance floor. The image had some basis in fact. During the World Fair’s final year, the pavilion hosted an underground nightclub, in the literal sense. A doorman wearing a black cape and demon horns would direct patrons downstairs. Waitresses in heels, fishnet stockings, and sporting a devilish tail served drinks. Perhaps not in the sense he intended, the swinging cellar-club scene proved Swayze’s claim that an Atomitat shell could “enclose a world of any dimension or content.”

In backing the Atomitat model home, Henderson staked a million dollar wager to promote his majority shareholder stake in the Underground World Home Corporation. He estimated that admissions from the attraction would yield gross revenues of at least $2,000,000, with ten percent going to the World’s Fair’s coffers. His visitor projections proved optimistic, however. Nearby pavilions underwritten by automobile manufacturers offered theme-park quality rides free of charge. The underground home’s one dollar admission (adjusted for inflation, $8.30 in 2020) was, for most fairgoers, too much for too little. Far more important than visitor receipts were new commissions for underground homes, and here too the results disappointed. During the two years that the pavilion was open, not a single new order was placed for an Atomitat. By contrast, two fully furnished model homes exhibited at the Fair by All-State Properties, a Long Island developer, reaped over 200 down payments. All-State reps boasted that they could provide a home “furnished right down to the toothbrushes” for $13,490. Swayze calculated the price of an unfurnished Atomitat at six times that: a best-case scenario premised upon the steady flow of commissions necessary to reduce construction costs. With the Cuban Missile Crisis a thing of the past, too few wealthy homebuyers felt endangered enough to invest in a mansion that multitasked as a bunker. The Underground World Home Corporation partnership dissolved soon after the Fair. According to Kenneth Swayze, a former associate, “there wasn’t enough market for the thing. It would be one here and one somewhere else across the country. It wasn’t something we wanted to pursue.” For Henderson, profiled in Time magazine as one of the nation’s shrewdest capitalists, the Underground World Home Corporation represented a rare lost wager.   

Swayze’s radical reconfiguration of the postwar suburban home staged its final disappearing act in Las Vegas, where Henderson built the last Atomitat thirty feet below a residential lot a few miles east of the glittering Strip. The two-bedroom home occupied 5,200 sq.ft. of a 16,500 sq.ft. concrete vault, the remainder dedicated to garden space.

Bunker building methods may have changed, but many of the challenges confronted by Swayze a half century ago remain the same. A potential stumbling block to selling luxury subterranean living in a Survival Condo, according developer Larry Hall, is depression. To combat it, fifty-inch flatscreen monitors, turned vertically to simulate windows, enliven apartment walls with live video images of the sweeping prairie just overhead. Alternatively, buyers can program a cameo performance of whatever their own special place was pre-apocalypse: a pine forest or, in the case of a buyer partial to the Big Apple, a view of Central Park.