ABSTRACT
At the 1964 World’s Fair held in Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, a Texas builder, Jay Swayze, introduced America’s rich to the concept of surviving disaster in style. For New York’s high-net-worth preppers, preparing for catastrophe by investing in a safe room or hideaway destination is a form of “apocalypse insurance”. For New York’s everyday preppers, this level of “apocalypse insurance” is not available. Instead, these middle- and working-class preppers rely on their hands-on skills and resourcefulness to outfit their homes to protect against disaster. Although the majority of these preppers likely believe that they will probably have to leave their homes in the event of a severe and prolonged disaster, they still make plans for the possibility of remaining at home. The history of New York’s programs designed to support sheltering in place is an important context for analyzing different approaches to “bugging in.”.
