August 28, 2001

THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEW WINDSOR, N.Y. - They called it the blockhouse, and from the outside at least, it lived up to its name. It was a windowless square with no distinguishing features except for a single beige stripe around its middle.

The four-story building was constructed of lead-reinforced concrete and was tucked behind a hill on a United States Air Force base in this small town 60 miles north of New York City. Since the building was hard to camouflage, the designers did the next best thing, making it so nondescript that few but those with a security clearance to get inside knew what went on there.

Now, the structure and its mysterious past have captured the imagination of two residents of the nearby town of New Paltz.

The two residents - Susan Zimet, 47, co-director of the Hudson Valley Media Arts Center, and Karl Rodman, 65, the president of River Valley Tours, an educational travel organization -- hope to turn it into a museum to commemorate what they see as the next era ripe for nostalgia: the cold war. They will call it the Cold War/Peace Museum.

"People need to see this and know what was going on right in their own backyard during that time," Ms. Zimet said.

Beginning in 1958, the building, once known as the
Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Direction Center and called SAGE, played a crucial role in America's defense against a possible Soviet air attack. It housed part of the military's first major computer-based command and control system.

Data from far-flung radar sites were transmitted over phone lines to computer consoles at this and 21 similar centers nationwide, where Air Force personnel scanned the skies, prepared at the touch of a button to intercept enemy planes with remote-controlled surface-to- air missiles.

After serving as the hub of Northeast air defense for more than a decade, the SAGE Center on the Stewart Air Force Base closed in the late 1960's, its technology made obsolete by the proliferation of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Tracking ICBM's required more sensitive radar and faster computers. It has sat ever since, largely empty and deteriorating, on the grounds of what is now Stewart International Airport.

Ms. Zimet and Mr. Rodman envision a museum that would not only explain the building and its technology, but also examine the impact of the cold war on all aspects of life in both the United States and the Soviet Union. It might also have a full-size theater that would show continuous screenings of cold war movies like "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" and "Seven Days in May."

Other potential exhibits include a life-size reconstruction of a family's backyard bomb shelter and a collection of oral histories from military personnel and civilians.

Ms. Zimet and Mr. Rodman are trying to raise $200,000 by Dec. 1 to finance feasibility and concept studies. They have been discussing their plans with Ralph Appelbaum Associates, a Manhattan museum design firm best known for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and Economics Research Associates, an entertainment consulting firm.

The museum project is among a growing number of efforts to preserve sites related to the time when fear of nuclear annihilation gripped America.

Francis Gary Powers Jr., son of the U-2 pilot whose reconnaissance plane was shot down over Russia in 1960, plans to open a museum on a former Nike missile base in Lorton, Va. On Long Island, a group wants to save the nation's last remaining intact Air Force radar tower and antenna, situated on state-owned land at Montauk Point. In New Jersey, the federal government is restoring another former Nike missile site at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook peninsula in hopes of turning it into a national park.

America is increasingly fascinated by the cold war, partly because enough time has passed for most people to truly consider it history, said Robert Sharlet, the Chauncey H. Winters professor of political science at Union College in Schenectady. Yet the cold war is still a vivid memory for nostalgia-prone baby boomers who participated in duck-and-cover drills at school and monitored the space race, he said.

"In a sense, everyone who lived through the cold war is a cold war veteran," Professor Sharlet said. "Now that all the unpleasantness is history and the memories are sanitized, I foresee cold war toys, T- shirts and bus tours of old" Strategic Air Command bomber sites. "Nostalgia is a terrific marketing tool, and pop culture is a great
earner."

Nevertheless, those interested in saving cold-war-related sites are not finding their task easy. Built to be functional, not beautiful, old radar towers, hulking
concrete computer centers and outdated missile bases can be a hard sell for those who favor preserving them.

Also, many of the properties have been stripped of the electronics that were arguably their most interesting feature. At the New Windsor site, one floor is now home to a company that makes chocolate lollipops by hand.

Upstairs, all that remains of the storied technology are the hulking air-conditioning units that once cooled two identical computer systems, each with approximately 50,000 vacuum tubes. In the command center, where air defense strategy was plotted, are two painted Plexiglas maps indicating the status of potential targets of enemy bombs.

In its heyday, the system featured the largest and most expensive real- time computer program every built. Designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratories and constructed by I.B.M., it pioneered technology that modern computer users now consider standard, including dial-up telephone modems and the mouse. Its advancements helped create today's airline reservation systems.

"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 New Windsor site from 1957 to 1960. "Compared to the older manual radar consoles, the SAGE consoles looked like something out of Buck Rogers."

Ms. Zimet and Mr. Rodman hope that the New Windsor building's role in history and its contributions to modern computing will help draw a crowd. They believe that a cold war museum in New Windsor will tie in with existing local historic military sites, particularly the United States Military Academy at West Point, which attracts 2.5 million visitors a year.

"I took one look at this and knew that its history and
significance were too great to do anything but make it into a museum," Ms. Zimet said. "The goal is to have them walk out with their hair standing up on the back of their necks and realizing that at any given moment, we could find ourselves back in that situation again."

Reprinted as fair use from the New York Times article