detonate.net - Would You Live In A Missile Silo For Only 2M$?

And how many stairs does this house have? How many windows? And the most common question is "is this still a target for Russia?" This is on sale on Ebay.

September 21, 2002 Stanfordavocate.com SARANAC, N.Y. -- On the surface, the house built by Bruce Francisco looks like a modest mountain chalet: mahogany siding, wraparound porch, a sunny great room with plenty of windows to take in the view. What makes this house extraordinary is what's under the surface. A heavy steel door in the great room opens to stairs descending into a cool, silent subterranean habitat created within the cylindrical remains of a Cold War relic. Francisco and his cousin, Gregory Gibbons, have converted a former Atlas F missile silo site into a luxury home, and they're offering it on the Internet auction site eBay for a starting bid of $2.1 million. The monthlong auction ends Sept. 25. The property is in far northeastern New York, north of the High Peaks of the Adirondack Mountains and about 25 miles south of the Canadian border. It includes a paved airstrip where Francisco lands his Cessna when he flies up from his home in Westbrook, Conn., where he has a construction business. If a bidder pays the full asking price of $25 million, the sellers will throw in a Cessna Skyhawk and 10 additional building lots for a total of 98 acres. They'll also build a three-bedroom addition on the surface house, and install an air purification system so the underground unit is a fully self-contained survival shelter. "Some of the potential buyers insist they want to live below ground," Francisco said. Others may prefer to live on the surface and use the underground part as a unique guest house - or perhaps as a safe refuge in the event of war, he said. Designed to withstand a nuclear impact, the structure is about as secure as you can get. "It also has great ambiance for parties," he added. The sales pitch on Gibbons' and Francisco's Web site, www.silohome.com, suggests a range of potential uses. Vacation getaway. Bed-and-breakfast. Corporate complex. Movie set. Recording studio. "Imagine having your own private James Bond 007 secret lair," says the eBay listing. "This could be your weapon against growing world terrorism." The missile silo was built when fears centered not on terrorism but on the specter of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Atlas F missile silos were constructed around the country in the late 1950s and early '60s, only to be decommissioned a few years later when their technology became obsolete. Most were abandoned. Steel salvagers gutted many. At some sites, town highway departments stash equipment in the surface Quonset huts and stockpile road sand on top of the sealed silo doors. Ed Peden, who runs 20th Century Castles from his silo home in Dover, Kansas, markets missile sites as potential homes or industrial facilities. He said he has sold 27. His Web site, www.missilebases.com, lists 10 Atlas F sites for sale. The site offered by Gibbons and Francisco is one of 12 built in 1960 surrounding the now-closed Plattsburgh Air Force Base on Lake Champlain. Each Atlas F site housed an 85-foot-tall intercontinental ballistic missile inside a 185-foot-deep, 50-foot-wide, underground cylinder of "super hardened" concrete. Beside that cylinder was a second one, two stories deep and 40 feet wide, housing the launch control center. That's the part Francisco converted into a three-bedroom, 2 1/2 bath residence. To reach the underground home, you descend two flights of stairs in a concrete shaft, follow a 30-foot corridor, go through two bank-vault-like steel blast doors, then go down 10 more steps. A door opens into a wide cylindrical room with gleaming hardwood floors, warm recessed lighting, and a 10-foot-high ceiling. There's a kitchen area at the far side and furniture groupings along the curving walls. A manhole in the ceiling has a ladder to an escape hatch in the garage. The center of the room is dominated by a massive support column wrapped by a staircase spiraling down to the bedrooms on the lower level. It is as still and silent as a tomb. "Nobody would have any trouble sleeping down here," Francisco said. He built a new cylinder of interior walls within the concrete shell, leaving a narrow space in between for plumbing, electrical wiring, and multimedia cables. Narrow panels of backlit glass bricks suggest windows. Converting the aging bunker into a cozy, contemporary home was no easy task. The silo and control center were filled with some 3 million gallons of water and sludge, which had to be pumped out. The 2,000-pound blast doors in the access tunnels were rusted in place. "It took gallons of WD-40, and a lot of pounding, to get them working," Francisco said. From the laundry area in the lower level, a massive steel door opens into a ribbed tunnel leading to the missile silo. The echoing, cavernous structure looks like a set from a science fiction movie. Illuminated by dazzling stadium lights, the rusty nine-story framework that once cradled a doomsday missile takes on a surreal quality. A narrow spiral stairway connects multiple levels of steel-mesh decking around the open center. The black surface of standing water gleams in the shadowy depths below. Enormous springs, each big as a doorway, suspend the steel frame: shock absorbers in case of attack. The missile stood on a launchpad that could be raised to the surface for firing. Gibbons bought the 105-acre site in 1989 for $55,000. He and Francisco later formed a partnership and subdivided the woods and fields into 10-acre building lots. They've sold one house. Plans for additional homes are on hold, in case a silo home buyer wants the whole parcel as a development investment or a private estate. It's been on the market for two years. "This represents a unique period of American history," Francisco said. "We're marketing a rare 20th-century collectible. Someday, it may be priceless."