It is most odd for residents of large cities to really see a starry sky. In summer it’s always too hazy; in winter on the Atlantic Coast, grey skies and rain perpetually clog the sky, the city lights reflecting back on the clouds. Only on a completely clear, chill night does the city dweller gaze on the starry firmament.

Imagine my surprise when, walking home tonight, I could look up and actually see stars. Lots of them! And in the middle of a pretty, inky-blue night sky, with a few puffy clouds drifting over. It looked as though the Valencia Theatre had exploded its walls out, and left a giant 1920s-techno-atmospheric ceiling over the whole city.

Then, I saw the Evil Cloud. A particularly odd-shaped cloud in nature, it was — well, it was a mushroom cloud. Since I am still alive and there was no boom nor subsequent fireflash, I knew that we weren’t under attack. It was unnerving, all the same, and called to mind some signs I’ve seen on Hopkins campus lately.

Remember those quietly ominous yellow and black signs? The ones with the three inverted triangles and the euphemistic legend “Fallout Shelter”? Now they’re mostly brown and black, the paranoid caution-yellow of 1960 faded into resigned 1995 obscurity.

I’ve actually started looking for these things. No, I don’t fear an attack from Russia. We’ve already got so many Russian cab drivers and dry cleaners in Baltimore that if Russia declares war on the United States, we’ll get dispensation from attack as a home of Russian expats. Besides, Russia has better things to do. And, despite prevalent Arabophobia, I don’t think any of the supposed renegade nations are quite ready to take on the United States, and I believe that for the most part they probably don’t really want to do so anyway. I am looking for these signs from an archaeological perspective.

When I was a third-grader at Immaculate Conception School, we actually still had air-raid drills. They were a bit half-hearted; I think everyone knew by then that if the Big One hit even one of those die-hard steel Catholic school desks (still with a hole for an inkbottle, thank you) wasn’t going to help. And we got to watch the famous “Duck and Cover” public-service trailer, the one that shows the happy picnicking family recognizing the attack and ducking under its picnic blanket. If the Pittsburgh steel desks wouldn’t help, I can’t imagine that twelve yards of gingham would do much for you either.

Which brings us back to the fallout shelters. Some of them seem well-placed — for instance, the old 1880s building that was the former headquarters of the Mercantile. The squat, hideous Victorian edifice survived the Great Fire of 1904 completely intact, not to mention the Panics of 1893 and 1907 and the Great Depression. I can’t imagine that Big Nukes would faze it too much, though some of the evil-looking gargoyles might need sunglasses. (Best of all, it’s lately been converted to a nightclub, the Merc having long ago moved to more commodious if not more beautiful headquarters. If you’re gonna be stuck in one building for months on end, in this one at least you’ll have a full bar.) The Fidelity Building has a similar solidity that reassures war-panicked citizens as much as it was intended to reassure twitchy investors.

Certain other Fallout Shelter buildings don’t inspire quite so much awe. The old Hopper-McGaw store on Charles street is, in theory, a shelter. Now, it’s a pretty well-built thing in all likelihood, but it has mammoth plate glass windows; it’s only three stories tall and as far as I can tell doesn’t exactly have six levels of subterranean refuge. Even more perplexing is JHU’s Remsen Hall. Named for one of the Victorian era’s captains of chemistry, it is indeed home to the University’s chemistry department. Well built or not — we’re supposed to ride out nuclear holocaust in a building full of beakers containing green caustic goo? No, thanks.

Of all buildings in Baltimore that proclaim themselves with those fading signs to be fallout shelters, there is precisely one that I would trust, and not simply for its massive granite construction and deep catacombs.

The Cathedral of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, seat of the Archbishop of the Holy See of Baltimore and premiere Cathedral in the United States, is a fallout shelter.