Where did J. Robert Oppenheimer grow up and live?

📍1967 Peach Street (Bathtub Row), Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA

1943 – 1945

“I directed the Manhattan Project from Los Alamos, New Mexico — a secret city built on a mesa in the high desert that did not officially exist, where the world's greatest concentration of physics talent worked in conditions of absolute secrecy to build the atomic bomb. I had chosen the site partly because I had loved the New Mexico landscape since my youth, riding horses through the desert and mountains, and the mesa's dramatic beauty — the vast sky, the Rio Grande far below, the Jemez Mountains rising behind — surrounded us as we worked. The community we built at Los Alamos was extraordinary: brilliant people living together in intense proximity, sharing the knowledge that what we were building would change the world. I watched the Trinity test on the 16th of July 1945 and thought of the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."”

👍 LovedThe extraordinary scientific community assembled at Los Alamos — the density of genius in one place was unlike anything before or since. The New Mexico landscape that I had always loved and that surrounded our secret work with beauty. The sense of purpose and urgency that the war gave to everything.

👎 DislikedThe moral weight of what we built. The Trinity test, after which nothing was the same. The security hearings of 1954 that stripped me of my clearance and were, in effect, my country's punishment for having doubts.

Map showing where J. Robert Oppenheimer lived — 1967 Peach Street (Bathtub Row), Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of J. Robert Oppenheimer's home at 1967 Peach Street (Bathtub Row), Los Alamos, NM 87544, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Bird, K. & Sherwin, M. American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), Knopf; Oppenheimer, J.R. The Open Mind (1955), Simon & Schuster; Rhodes, R. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986), Simon & Schuster