APPLE’S ‘BUNKER’ BONKERS
Panic room boom
New Yorkers are fortifying their homes with panic rooms and bullet-proof doors like never before over fears about crime, migrants and national turmoil — and it’s not just the city’s elite partaking in the trend.
“Not every [customer] is an ultrarich stockbroker — a lot of them are just people, middle-class kind of people,” said Steve Humble, founder of home-defense contractor Creative Home Engineering.
“I’d say the pandemic really kicked off an uptick. Business was really good throughout the pandemic time, and it really hasn’t slowed down,” said Humble, who specializes in top-of-the-line secret doors disguised as bookshelves, fireplaces, mirrors, blank walls and whatever else a client can think of to conceal a safety room behind them.
He is one of numerous homedefense contractors who told The Post that the past four years have been a boon for business, with New Yorkers from all walks of life shelling out thousands of dollars to outfit their homes with hidden rooms, bulletproof doors and a swath of other covert security systems to keep the baddies at bay should they come knocking.
Driving this force is a decline in New Yorkers’ sense of safety, Humble and others say. Assaults last year reached 28,000 for the first time on record — and the perceptible shift toward volatile instability that many people feel is rising across American society.
“Whether it’s real or perceived, people feel like crime is up,” Humble said, explaining he has installed “well over 100” doors in homes across New York, with middle-class homes in Queens and The Bronx standing out.
David Vranicar, whose company Fortified and Ballistic Security specializes in such things as bulletproof doors and windows, said New Yorkers from less affluent parts of Queens and Brooklyn have been driving his business in the city, too.
“Those are the people that actually need to stop bad guys from getting in the house,” Vranicar said. “[What] my clients have been expressing to me is we saw how quickly society can break down during COVID.”
While Humble specializes in concealing without-a-trace hidden safe rooms, Vranicar’s defensive philosophy is focused on keeping the baddies moving on by fortifying points of entry such as front doors and windows.
He said he also focuses on bedrooms, where homeowners are most likely to be at their most vulnerable — asleep — should trouble make its way inside.
High-end projects
Vranicar and Humble offer highend custom projects, as well as products to reinforce or conceal doors on more conservative budgets. Humble’s most affordable hidden door costs about $1,000, and though Vranicar’s cheapest door starts around $6,000, he pointed out that installing one such door on an apartment above ground level is going to make the place as secure as it can be.
For the not-so-average New Yorkers, there’s Bill Rigdon of Panic Room Builders — who caters to clients with homes worth a minimum of about $10 million.
“The people below that can’t get their head around spending $50,000 for a door,” Rigdon told The Post. He builds panic rooms averaging between $100,000 and $200,000. The rooms are equipped with a host of defensive measures and life support, such as food, water, plumbing, medical equipment, power sources and communication systems.
Rigdon’s rooms can have electrified handles, smoke-screen launchers, concealed nozzles for blasting dyed pepper spray at intruders and remote-controlled robots or drones armed with shotgun shells.