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What's up Chicago? I'm Erin Allen, and this is Curious City.

As we learned last episode, the city of Chicago is a nuclear-free zone.

That means nobody here can quote, design, produce, deploy, launch, maintain, or store nuclear weapons, end quote.

Five, four, three, two, one.

That language is right there in the city's municipal code and has been since 1986.

But despite that designation, there are still vestiges of the Cold War here in Chicago

in the form of nuclear fallout shelters.

Thousands of tons of Earth particles are drawn upward into the ascending mushroom cloud,

where radioactive products of the nuclear explosion contaminate them.

Eventually they settle to Earth, and this is called radioactive fallout.

Chicago had a public network of shelters to protect people from potential nuclear fallout,

the kind that would follow an atomic bomb blast.

Several years ago, Curiosity listener, Kyle Bolliard, noticed a sign for one of these shelters

in Niles, which is a suburb.

So we're here right now at Howard and McCormick where this sign is.

And I, you know, I pass this building every single day.

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