12-05-2025
Reading refurbishes Cold War artifact
The end of the Cold War was not kind to Reading's Emergency Operations Center.
The bunker embedded in the foothills of Mount Penn below 13th Street in City Park was designed as a location from where city officials could lead the local government in case of a doomsday scenario that seemed frighteningly imminent in the early 1960s.
One can imagine, though, how much solace the city department heads could take as they huddled within the hillside structure — while a Soviet H-Bomb strike at the heart of a then-thriving Reading manufacturing and industrial base would have yielded a multimegaton blast with a fireball exceeding temperatures found on the surface of the sun — the concrete-encased shelter extending the city leaders' collective survival time by about, oh, 2 seconds.
David A. Anspach, city capital project manager, enters the Emergency Operations Center in City Park. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE)
Be that as it may, the last person to leave turned out the lights, locked the doors and never looked back many decades ago with all of the furniture, equipment and Civil Defense survival rations inside.
As city workers finally got around to dealing with the center, they opened it last year to find what could have been a time capsule to another era.
But as many ceremonial openings of community time capsules have revealed, the years had devolved the contents into a moldering mass of sludge, save for a few coins depicting the date of the capsule burial.
And cockroaches.
'When we opened it up, it was completely deteriorated,' David Anspach, city capital projects manager, said as he led a recent media tour through the refurbished facility. 'It was mold infested. I mean, it was pretty, pretty bad.'
Because the shelter was designed to accommodate the city councilmen who under the government structure at the time each ran a department, there were 10 sleeping bags and 10 cots in storage.
'As soon as we took those sleeping bags out in the open air and unrolled them, all of the stitching fell apart, and it was just panels of nylon,' Anspach said. 'So it was kind of like an Egyptian-pyramid, surreal-type experience. The moisture had been so bad inside that it had rotted through the fold-out army cots.'
Found among the debris was a Civil Defense medical manual dated July 1962, three months before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
All that remained of cases of canned water were the cans — the water had seeped out, he said.
'At one point, there was a shelf full of light bulbs with cardboard sleeves on them, and it was just light bulbs,' Anspach said. 'There were no cardboard sleeves left. So just to kind of paint a picture of what it looked like to go in there, it had largely just been walked away from.'
Civil Defense instructions from 1962, the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis, lie inside the city's Emergency Operations Center. (Courtesy of the city of Reading)
All of the paint had peeled and curled away from the walls.
'It looked like Chernobyl in here,' Anspach said.
The reasons for the last time the bomb shelter was used and for what purpose have disappeared in the radioactive mists of time.
It all looked pretty hopeless, and the city officials opened bids that totaled over $150,000 to demolish the bunker and landscape the area.
What Anspach discovered, though, was that for a fraction of the cost of demolishing the thick, concrete structure, the city could clean out the center, install upgraded ventilation to keep the humidity levels in check, repaint the insides and replace the doors, repurposing the site at a cost of $48,500.
Civil Defense supplies deteriorate inside the city of Reading's Emergency Operations Center. (Courtesy of city of Reading)
The design of the center reflects its original purpose.
'The doors, from what I understand, as well as the room are uniquely arranged that when you come in, you walk down a hallway, and the main body of the room is offset from the doorway,' Anspach explained. 'That way, a blast doesn't come directly into the room. Also, the rear doorway is situated behind the front doorway. That way, you wouldn't get hit from both sides at the same time and be kind of sandwiched in the middle.'
A new heating and cooling system wasn't required since the underground facility stays naturally around 50 degrees year round.
'Once we cleaned it out, we determined that it was sound structurally,' he said. 'So instead of tearing it down, we elected to repurpose it, or at least rebuild it for a future purpose.'
Crews repainted the interior with a crisp, Strangelove-like sea-foam green, keeping with the early '60s color palette.
Anspach is hoping the refurbished bomb shelter could be used for educational purposes during an event like World War II Weekend at the Reading Regional Airport.
'A lot of that education during the weekend doesn't make it here into the city,' he said. 'City Park has a strong military history to it. So it would be great if we were to partner with reenactors of this era, and they could bring in maybe cots and radios, and they could set it up and bring some of that educational value to our citizens here in Reading.'
If that doesn't happen, Anspach sees the operations center as an adjunct to the nearby City Park Greenhouse, a place where wintering bulbs and root vegetables can be stored.
Although the 'Blessed are the peacemakers' vibe has subsided a bit in recent years, there is a measure of theological symmetry with beating swords into plowshares, spears into pruninghooks and bomb shelters into root cellars.
'It's a cool piece of history to have,' Anspach said, looking around the now pristine underground bunker. 'It's unique.'
David A. Anspach, city capital project manager, stands inside the exit hallway at the Emergency Operations Center in City Park. (BILL UHRICH/READING EAGLE)
