With Special Thanks to Anthony Casendino
In 1959, the Cornell College of Architecture launched a study to
design a city that could survive nuclear attack. In the view of
Prof. Fredrick W. Edmondson, existing cities were ill-suited to the
demands of the Cold War, and he proposed to design from whole cloth a
new alternative, better adapted to the rigors of the nuclear age.
The Schoharie Valley Townsite project was one of the most ambitious
civil defense proposals of the Cold War: a factory-town that could
not only withstand nuclear attack, but maintain war production even
as the hydrogen bombs burst around it.