By Jared Ebersole in Video — 28 Feb 2026

The Manhattan Project Left Radioactive Footprints in New York

Before Oak Ridge and Los Alamos became famous, the atomic bomb project had offices, warehouses, and university labs hidden in New York City.

The Manhattan Project did not only happen in desert laboratories and fenced-off towns.

It happened in Manhattan.

Where it is

Key New York sites include the former Baker & Williams warehouses around 513 W. 20th Street, 270 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, and Columbia University's Pupin Hall at 538 W. 120th Street.

The name itself started as a cover. In 1942, the Army Corps of Engineers created the Manhattan Engineer District, with early offices at 270 Broadway. The bland name helped conceal the real mission: organize the scientific, industrial, and military work needed to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could.

Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos became the famous places. New York became the footnote. But before the project moved fully into its remote wartime geography, the city played several roles at once: headquarters, university lab, procurement hub, storage site, and scientific recruiting ground.

One of the strangest traces sits in Chelsea.

The former Baker & Williams warehouses on West 20th Street were used during the 1940s to store uranium concentrates connected to Manhattan Project and Atomic Energy Commission work. Department of Energy records describe shipments that included sodium uranyl carbonate and black uranium oxide, later distributed to other government facilities. Pace University's NYC Nuclear Archive summarizes the scale at roughly 300,000 pounds of uranium material stored there between 1942 and 1943.

The building did not look like a secret atomic site. That was the point. It was a warehouse in an industrial city, close to freight routes and ordinary commerce. After the war, the danger became less dramatic but more uncomfortable: contamination lingered.

In 1989, the Department of Energy conducted a radiological screening survey of the New York site and found enough contamination to recommend it for cleanup under FUSRAP, the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program. Cleanup work followed in the early 1990s. Local histories and nuclear archive summaries note readings reported as high as 38 times federal limits in parts of the site, and the remediation removed drums of contaminated material decades after the uranium had passed through.

The city's more famous scientific site was uptown at Columbia.

Columbia was a critical center for early American nuclear research. Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, John Dunning, Eugene Booth, Harold Urey, and others worked in and around the university's physics facilities as the U.S. government moved from theoretical possibility toward wartime program. Fission had already been discovered in Europe by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, then interpreted by Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch. Columbia's importance was in confirming, extending, organizing, and scaling the work in America.

Pupin Hall became one of the addresses where the future of warfare was being dragged, literally, into place.

The best detail is almost too strange to believe: Columbia football players were reportedly hired to move heavy materials, including graphite and uranium, for the scientists' experiments. Columbia College Today revisited the story in 2026, describing how players helped Fermi's group move materials for early fission work. They were not told they were helping lay groundwork for the most destructive weapon ever built.

That is what makes the New York version of the Manhattan Project so unsettling. It hides inside normal city life.

The headquarters was an office building. The uranium was in a warehouse. The experimental materials moved through a university campus. The people nearby were not living inside the mental image of a secret weapons complex. They were walking past loading docks, classrooms, elevators, and brownstone blocks.

The city was not the whole project. The bomb was not built in Chelsea. The Trinity test did not happen on Broadway. But New York helped turn a loose scientific emergency into an organized industrial system. It was where a name was chosen, contracts were managed, uranium was moved, and ideas became logistics.

That is the part easy histories flatten.

The Manhattan Project was not only a story of genius and secrecy. It was a supply chain. It needed ore, offices, warehouses, labs, laborers, accountants, soldiers, scientists, and places nobody would think to question.

In New York, some of those places are still standing.