Chronicle No. 75 · Incidents

The Wing With No Guests: The Greenbrier's Thirty-Year Secret

A West Virginia resort added a conference wing in 1961. Under the exhibition hall, behind a folding false wall, was a bunker built to hold the United States Congress.

The Greenbrier, at White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, has been sending guests to its mineral waters since the eighteenth century. The present hotel dates from 1913, white and enormous in the Allegheny hills.

Between 1958 and 1961 it built a new West Virginia Wing, with a large exhibition hall for conferences and trade shows.

Underneath it, the United States government built a bunker.

Project Greek Island was a relocation facility for the whole of Congress — around 112,000 square feet of it, cut into the hillside. Dormitories with more than a thousand bunks. A clinic. A power plant. A decontamination room. Chambers sized for the House and for the Senate. Blast doors weighing up to 25 tons.

The entrance from the hotel side sat behind a folding false wall at the end of the Exhibit Hall. For thirty years the hall hosted conventions with a nuclear blast door a few metres away, and the delegates set out their stands against it.

The facility was kept in readiness by technicians working under the name Forsythe Associates — a company whose visible business was servicing the hotel's televisions.

On 31 May 1992 the Washington Post published Ted Gup's account of the bunker. Its usefulness ended with the article. It was decommissioned, and the Greenbrier now sells tickets to walk through it.

Lesson: A hotel can keep a secret longer than a government can — but only until somebody asks the right question in print.