NEW YORK (AP) – In 17 years of working in the darkened nooks and crannies of the city’s bridges, Joe Vaccaro has made some unusual finds: a 100-year-old copy of a newspaper, sepia-toned photographs. But none of them matched the level of intrigue generated by another discovery he and his co-workers made in the Brooklyn Bridge.

As they made their way through the musty, dusty and dark structural foundations on the bridge’s Manhattan side last week, they discovered a Cold War-era cache of provisions to have been used in the wake of a nuclear attack: some 350,000 packaged crackers, paper blankets, metal drums for water and medical supplies.

“I’ve never found anything as significant as this,” Vaccaro, a carpentry supervisor, said Tuesday while standing in the attic-like room amid the stockpile with one of his co-workers, George Klein, and their boss, Department of Transportation Commissioner Iris Weinshall.

For many, the artifacts recalled a fearful period in U.S. history a half-century ago, when the country was at odds militarily with the Soviet Union and air-raid sirens and shelters were common.

“This is a treasure of modern history,” Weinshall said later. “It was a time when the country worried about a nuclear attack.”

Department of Transportation officials, who control the bridge, didn’t want the exact location of the items publicized, citing security reasons.

Weinshall said she has contacted the Civil Defense Museum and the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene about taking the items, which include syringes and Dextran, an intravenous drug.

The Office of Civil Defense, which was part of the Pentagon and a precursor to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, provided emergency services after natural and man-made disasters at the time and probably put the supplies there, Weinshall said. It’s also possible the city’s old Department of General Services, now the Department of Citywide Administrative Services, was responsible for the stash, which The New York Times first reported Tuesday.

Weinshall said right now there’s no way to tell whether the supplies were intended to be used at the bridge in case of an attack or if the bridge was only a storage space.

“Until we get to the bottom – when it was put here, who put it here – we won’t know fully,” she said.

Some of the items were stamped 1957 or 1962, significant years in Cold War history. In the former, the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite; in the latter, the Cuban missile crisis engendered fears of nuclear destruction.

Fallout shelters were common around the country in the 1950s, but such finds are rare, said Cold War scholar John Lewis Gaddis, a historian at Yale University.

“Most of those have been dismantled; the crackers got moldy a very long time ago,” he said. “It’s kind of unusual to find one fully intact – one that is rediscovered, almost in an archaeological sense. I don’t know of a recent example of that.”

The 17.5-gallon metal drums, presumably once filled with water, were labeled, “Reuse as a commode.” The Civil Defense All-Purpose Survival Crackers were sealed in dozens of metal canisters. One of the canisters, however, had broken open.

Weinshall tasted a cracker.

“It tasted,” she said, “like cardboard.”

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