I’ve seen pictures of this place before, but this is the first article I’ve seen with this much detail. But I admire the kitschy over-the-top attempts to make an underground concrete room look like a green backyard. Then again, isn’t Vegas home of fake Eiffel Towers, Stutes of Liberty, and enormous fake boobs?
The underground house at 3970 Spencer St. was built for comfort, too, with two hot tubs, a sauna and an in-ground pool in a room larger than some houses in the valley.
It was also constructed to withstand a nuclear blast. It had to be. Girard “Jerry” B. Henderson, who had the home built in 1978, planned to wait out the end of the world inside the structure. Now it’s on the market for $1.7 million, which includes the two-bedroom underground house, the one-bedroom underground guest house, the two-bedroom, two-story caretaker’s house, a four-car garage and more than 1 acre of surface property.
“I’ve been told when he built it, he had a million dollars of marble imported from Italy,” said Winston King of Kingly Properties, which is handling the sale of the house. “It’s here on the fireplace and around the pool now.”
When it was built, the only signs of the house on the surface were an unusual number of ground-mounted air-conditioning units camouflaged by clusters of large rocks. A few larger rocks concealed stairways and an elevator. A caretaker’s house was added later, and the main entrance to the underground house now runs through it.
When visitors reach the ground level, they’re in the front yard of the house looking at the entrance to the 40-foot-by-46-foot room. To the left are the dance floor and the stage. The décor still greatly reflects the original owners’ tastes, from the indoor fountains and waterfalls to the abundance of pink in the kitchen and bathroom.
“They had it all down here,” said King, opening up an artificial rock to reveal an underground outdoor grill. “This vents through the tree behind it.”
Two words: ‘Water’ and ‘Power’.
Add a third: “Air.”
Not familiar with below-ground temperatures in Las Vegas — it’s a place I try to avoid, for a multitude of reasons — but I’ve spent enough time in the desert southwest to know that while below ground won’t be as hellishly hot as the surface in summer, it won’t be exactly cool and comfortable either.
And unless this guy was smart enough to design his ventilation system to function “naturally” — with no electricity or moving parts — it’s unlikely that the underground structures will be habitable when the power goes out. From the description and images, it doesn’t appear likely that this compound incorporated any passive ventilation measures. He might have been able to hide such in the caretaker’s house, but if he was worried about Vegas being nuked then it wouldn’t seem likely any above-ground structures would have survived.
All in all, it sounds like a monument to “more money than brains.” An example of a certain mindset that believes it’s possible to survive TEOTWAWKI with no change in lifestyle, and no preparations beyond throwing money around. Maybe it can be called “Country-club survivalism”?