One-of-a-kind properties sometimes take a little while to sell. The underground house at 3970 Spencer St. in Las Vegas still hasn't found a buyer — even though the bank that now owns the home has marked the price down from $8 million to $1.7 million, reports the Las Vegas View ("Underground home was built as Cold War-era hideaway," by F. Andrew Taylor).
"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."
After getting rich from investments in cosmetics, aerospace, and television, Henderson founded Underground World Homes, and sponsored a 1964 New York World's fair exhibit called "Why Live Underground" — inspired, the View reports, "by Henderson's belief that the Cold War would not end as it did — with a David Hasselhoff concert and Mikhail Gorbachev tearing down that wall — but with the last remnants of humanity hunkered down in underground bunkers."
If hunkering down is your preferred lifestyle, the former Henderson home will suit you to a T. "Rather than building a shelter to duck into when the air raid sirens blew, the Hendersons lived underground full time," the paper reports. "There is plenty of storage space and shelving so the couple could hole up for a year or more if they had to."
