Those wanting to see the actual entrance – the portal, if you will – must follow the scientists’ path up the hill to Los Alamos, which is still home to a US Energy Department laboratory. He chose the remote Los Alamos Ranch boarding school to build a military research site. Eventually Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist at the University of California, was tasked with leading the effort to beat them to it. The US military history of 109 East Palace dates to 1939, when Albert Einstein wrote a letter to US president Franklin D Roosevelt warning that the Germans were on the cusp of developing an atomic weapon. The building is also home to the popular Shed Restaurant, where lines form daily for its green chile enchiladas. The gift shop occupies a mere corner of a 17th-Century hacienda that once belonged to a Spanish conquistador and covers most of a city block. A strange museum at the 'centre of the world'.The invention that inspired a New York tradition.“These rooms right here were the offices,” Kapoun said, waving her hand past guidebooks and historical Native American photographs on sale in the store’s back room. The storefront, marked with an inconspicuous sign reading “US ENG-RS”, an abbreviation for “Engineers”, handled correspondence for Los Alamos and processed new residents. The East Palace address, located half a block from the historic Santa Fe Plaza, was the only public-facing site of the Manhattan Project, the code name for the bomb-building effort. Over a period of 27 months, the US Army built the secret Los Alamos research laboratory in the Jemez Mountains and designed an unimaginably powerful weapon that eventually destroyed two Japanese cities, effectively ending the war and ushering in the atomic age. And what they eventually accomplished, the plaque says, was “one of the greatest scientific achievements in human history”.īut few modern visitors to Santa Fe, a Spanish colonial city known for its adobe buildings and art galleries, realise they’re crossing paths with Nobel laureates – and a nest of spies.ĭuring World War Two, the small city was on the frontlines of the race to build the atomic bomb. Their destination lay 35 miles away, up tortuous, unpaved mountain roads, in the hidden settlement of Los Alamos. The newcomers, which included a contingent of British scientists, were issued security passes and loaded from the facility onto a bus or a Jeep for the last leg of their journey. Visitors now enter the shop through a front door the historical entrance where scientists like Enrico Fermi and Richard Feynman once passed, is blocked, and the walkway cluttered with dangling ceramic chillies and hand-painted jack-o-lantern gourds. “They came in through the courtyard,” said Marianne Kapoun, who with her husband owns The Rainbow Man gift shop, which occupies the formerly classified facility.
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