I was four-years old in October of 1962. I distinctly remember my parents showing me a sign like this, and telling me to go quickly to a place with this sign if the sirens sounded while I was outside playing. (Yes, we did play outside unattended at that age in that time period.) It would be years later that I would connect those instructions to what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, signs like these are just relics of the Cold War. Most of the buildings that had them are long since gone, and those few that still remain no longer point to a stocked bomb shelter. This one is on the Whitehall Building on Waterman Avenue in the Greystone section of North Providence. It was once mill housing, but in the Cold War era it also served as the neighborhood fallout shelter. A shelter, thankfully, that was never needed.
There are several interesting touches added to this photo in post processing. I ran it through Topaz Adjust to bring out the clarity and detail in the image. That process removed some of the grunge from the building, though, so I toned down the saturation and readjusted the hue to get the sign back to its authentic color. I then overlaid the image with a dark blue marble texture with a soft light blend mode. The texture was then duplicated with a multiply blend mode. Finally, I cut a section out of the topmost texture layer and feathered that cut by 200 pixels. That effect is what produced the dark tinge shadow around the sign, leaving the sign itself in relative light.
