- 15 hours ago
Abandoned Engineering - Season 15 Episode 3 -
The Nazi's Last Stand
The Nazi's Last Stand
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00:00One man's eccentric vision in the jungles of Malaysia.
00:05Many locals are convinced that this site is haunted, and you can understand why.
00:10This building has seen a lot of action, and not all of it was pleasant.
00:16A pioneering palace in Chicago, the largest of its kind in the world.
00:22It was IMAX before they even invented IMAX.
00:25Nazi towers in Berlin, defended to the bitter end by the only fighters left in town.
00:33Let's call them what they were. They were child soldiers.
00:38And a castle-like compound in San Francisco, born out of the ashes of tragedy.
00:44It's the brainchild of a man who wants to revolutionize an industry,
00:50but all of his efforts would be undone by a radical national reform.
00:55In the German capital is a rare survivor of a time when the city resembled a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
01:12We're in the center of Berlin, and in a public park, there is what appears to be a hill, and as you get closer, it has got a massive old building right in the middle of it.
01:34It's got these two really huge protrusions that kind of look like castles, but it's just a big hulking mess of concrete.
01:43Once you get inside, you realize there is much more to this place than is immediately visible above the ground.
01:52It seems to disappear into the earth.
01:59We are only getting a fractional glimpse at the size of it.
02:02You can see blasts, dings, chunks that have been ripped out of the concrete.
02:08When the enemy was at Berlin's doorstep, this structure became both a target and a lifeline.
02:17The city's inhabitants came streaming in to what was one of the last safe places in the city.
02:23These towers are the last thing keeping Berlin alive.
02:31But it wasn't soldiers manning the tower. It was women and children.
02:36The kids got as young as about 14 years old.
02:39Yet they would rather die than surrender.
02:42This became the final holdout in the last stand of the Third Reich.
02:48The first time I came in here, I had already built it up in my head.
02:59And even that didn't live up in the slightest to what we were actually seeing.
03:04Athena Kerins works for an organization that has unearthed hidden layers of this structure.
03:11The scale of this building when it was still standing is almost impossible to comprehend.
03:16For decades, it sat as an inaccessible hunk of concrete on top of this park.
03:23Surrounding it were tales and rumors from Berlin's darkest days under the Nazi regime.
03:31Hermann Goering, the commander of the Luftwaffe, promised the people of Germany that Berlin would never be bombed.
03:42But early in the Second World War, a mistake by a German pilot started a chain reaction that proved Goering wrong.
03:53On the 24th of August 1940, a German bomber gets lost.
03:59It accidentally drops a rack of bombs onto London.
04:06Revenge was swift.
04:09British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately ordered the Royal Air Force to retaliate.
04:14That first night only 22 planes actually made it to Berlin.
04:19Most got lost in bad weather and missed their targets.
04:24The only damage inflicted was to kill an elephant at Berlin Zoo.
04:28Yet it proved British bombers had the range to strike the German capital.
04:33It was enough to break the illusion that Berlin was safe and the vulnerability of Berlin was exposed incredibly quickly.
04:42And at that time, in that summer of 1940, we get the escalation of city bombing.
04:53London was pounded for 57 days straight in a campaign that was later named the Blitz.
04:59While going on the attack, the Nazis began to bolster defences in their own capital.
05:07And in order to protect the city, the Nazis build massive anti-aircraft towers.
05:16The German word for anti-aircraft is Flieger-Abwehr-Kannone, anti-aircraft cannons.
05:26And that shortens to flak.
05:29These were flak towers, flak-turma.
05:33This is the Humboldtine Flak Tower.
05:38Its design reflects Hitler's specific wimp, which he sketched on a scrap of paper.
05:46These towers were originally meant to deter planes from coming near the centre of the city.
05:54And the idea that Hitler had in his mind was something a bit like a medieval castle.
05:59They take thousands of soldiers and hundreds of POWs to build these towers in just less than six months.
06:08Six stories high, the four towers were topped with flak guns and anti-aircraft machine guns.
06:18The dream was partially to show the military might of his empire, but also to actually serve a military purpose.
06:25In late 1943, Allied bombers shifted their focus from industrial districts to civilian neighborhoods.
06:34The Flak Tower was called into action on an almost daily basis.
06:38People may be more familiar with the bombing of London, known as the Blitz, but in terms of numbers, it doesn't compare with the bombardment of German cities.
06:51Those people defending this flak tower witnessed 363 air raids strike Berlin.
06:58People who were in this building during air raids said that it kind of felt like being at a ship at sea, even though it was a massive concrete building secured on an 84 meter sand bed, still it rocked with the guns.
07:12As bombing intensified, citizens sought refuge from the Allied onslaught.
07:19In addition to serving as flak towers, this is going to be a perfect place for an air raid shelter.
07:26Slices of Berlin life had to move into the Humboldt-Hein Flak Tower.
07:34There were children who were going to school.
07:36There were maternity hospitals.
07:39It was the only safe place in Berlin to give birth.
07:45As the Allies advanced on Berlin from all sides, the Nazis shipped out every soldier available to the front lines.
07:53For every man that they sent out, they brought in about eight children.
07:58The way that they sold this to the parents is they say, here they'll be safe.
08:02They'll be in a bomb-proof building.
08:04They'll still do their 18 hours of school a week.
08:07But during the night, they will be heroes of the Reich.
08:10They will be defending our city.
08:12The official title of these children who were working and fighting here were the Luftwaffehilfen.
08:17The air force helpers. Let's call them what they were. They were child soldiers.
08:23These kids were about to come up against an army thirsty for revenge.
08:31Berlin, April 1945.
08:34Soviet troops were the first of the Allied forces to arrive at the city's doorstep.
08:41On the 16th, they crossed the Oder River.
08:45The Battle of Berlin had begun.
08:48But the mass of Berlin's defense was teenagers, old people, women who'd been brought in to fire anti-aircraft guns.
09:01They were given a hasty preparation, handed a weapon and being told,
09:07the Russians are coming, start shooting.
09:10As the Soviets got even closer to the city, many Berliners, many of whom were already homeless, started flooding into the Flak Tower.
09:19This building that was originally designed to only host about 15,000 civilians regularly had up to 50,000.
09:27The Humboldtine Flak Tower was targeted as a major obstacle to Soviet advances into the center of the city.
09:34You can only imagine the deafening sound of bombs and artillery hitting the walls.
09:41It must have felt like the whole place was going to collapse in on you.
09:47Despite a barrage of artillery, the towers, with their eight feet thick, reinforced concrete walls held firm.
09:56But Berlin was crumbling around them, and Hitler saw the writing on the wall.
10:01The Humboldtine is not far from Hitler's bunker.
10:06And when the news came that Hitler had killed himself, that the Fuhrer was dead, they lost the ability to cope.
10:16The Soviets were particularly brutalized by Nazi ideology.
10:21The men coming in here did have revenge on their mind, which also led to large swaths of suicides, particularly among women and girls.
10:31Many of whom threw themselves down the spiral staircase instead of living in a world where they had lost.
10:38But their sons and brothers, the young boys left behind, refused to lay down their arms.
10:45Even after Hitler kills himself, even after Berlin surrenders, these towers just keep on fighting.
10:57They held out for another day after the city garrison had surrendered.
11:02But finally, Soviet troops took the building on the 3rd of May 1945.
11:09It was one of the few structures left standing.
11:12Over 80% of the city had been levelled.
11:15After World War II, Berlin was divided into different sectors.
11:21The French are going to control the sector that has these flak towers.
11:25Their attempt to demolish them only partially succeeded, leaving two of the four towers standing.
11:32And they rapidly determined that they cannot realistically destroy the flak tower without destroying Berlin around it.
11:45So the French decide to bury it.
11:47Berlin was massively destroyed, so rubble from across the entire French sector was piled up to make a small mountain atop of the building.
11:58And that is what we see today.
11:59At the time it was simply a pile of rubble, but over the years it's become covered with topsoil, with trees, with bushes.
12:05And now it is a beautiful park with this massive relic in the middle.
12:15For decades, people wanted to forget the horrors of the war.
12:20And the tower's legacy remained buried.
12:23Until the Berlin Underworlds Association began digging.
12:27A historical society found an entranceway in the rubble.
12:31And an entire subterranean world opened up.
12:36They began to lead the public into these fated hallways for the first time in 60 years.
12:50In a busy neighborhood of North Chicago, an ornate structure stands out from the crowd.
13:02On one of these streets, we see this massive facade with the word Uptown emblazoned on it.
13:09When you step into this place, it's almost like you're being transported into another world.
13:15There's grand columns that are reaching into the ceiling.
13:19There's relief carvings everywhere you look in a sweeping staircase in the lobby.
13:23There are thousands of upholstered chairs facing a grand stage.
13:29This was a place to entertain.
13:31Once the jewel in the city's crown, it was the largest of its kind in the world.
13:37But a reckoning was coming that would bring this party to an end.
13:42And ultimately make way for a new one.
13:44One man saw the opportunity to bring new life into this building.
13:50You walk into this place and you can't help but fall in love with it.
13:54A new era saw the volume cranked up to 11.
13:57All the shows that played here were top-notch performers on their way up.
14:10David Sivchik has been a custodian of this historic building for nearly 30 years.
14:15But he first visited as a young boy in the late 1950s.
14:23We'd come see the feature films with my parents.
14:27I would come here, order my popcorn.
14:30And through the windows here, I could still watch the film.
14:35This was still the golden age of Hollywood.
14:38A time when the cinema was king.
14:40In these days before television, movies played a huge role in people's lives.
14:48Especially people who lived in cities like this.
14:50People were going to the movies as much as three times a week.
14:53And sometimes they would sit through a double feature.
14:56In this heyday of films, lavish cinemas were popping up across the country.
15:02And I'm of the age where every theatre was a movie palace.
15:06So I was under the impression that every neighbourhood had one of these.
15:11Little did I know how special this building actually was.
15:15This is the Uptown Theatre.
15:19It opened in 1925 to great fanfare.
15:24To mark the occasion, the entire city turned out.
15:28There were two whole weeks of parades and 12,000 people were out on the streets.
15:32This theatre had seating for 4,500 people.
15:38Making it the biggest movie theatre in the world at the time it opened.
15:42There were 131 full-time employees here.
15:45Not a single expense was spared.
15:48The lobby, for example, was modeled after the Palace of Versailles.
15:52So as you entered the grand lobby here, immediately your eyeballs popped out at the opulence of the theatre.
15:58The chandeliers alone cost $30,000 back in 1925 when it opened.
16:06That would be something like half a million today.
16:09At one point there was even a Rembrandt hanging on one of the walls.
16:13The auditorium is so vast that the screen was 60 by 30.
16:17So it was IMAX before they even invented IMAX.
16:19The building as a whole was designed to function as a one-stop shop.
16:25This was built for an urban, pedestrian, streetcar-riding population.
16:33So they had amenities. They had a nursery.
16:36You could drop your kids off and go see an afternoon matinee.
16:40Can you imagine people doing that today? It's just inconceivable.
16:43For decades, the Uptown Theatre thrived and was at the heart of the local community.
16:51But the popularity of home television sets in the 1950s was accompanied by dramatic changes to cinema building.
17:00The priority was now on quantity, not quality.
17:04It was hard for them to compete with a multiplex built out by the interstate somewhere that might have 8 or 12 screens.
17:14This shift in movie going made these really lavish places like the Uptown completely obsolete.
17:23But one young entrepreneur saw an opportunity in its fading grandeur and would grant it new life.
17:31You walk into this place and you can't help but fall in love with it.
17:37The lobby is spectacular. I got married in the lobby.
17:41In 1975, Jerry Mickelson, the current owner and music promoter, was searching for a theatre that could host top bands and rock concerts without the restrictions he encountered in the center of Chicago.
17:55Originally, we started downtown at some beautiful old theaters, but the old theaters became very restrictive with who they would let in to play at their venues.
18:08Chicago had a lot of rules. The stagehands had to belong to the union. The police were keeping an eye on illicit activity. There were noise ordinances.
18:17When Bob Marley came into a downtown theater, the people that owned the theater went nuts because as soon as he walked in there smoking ganja. We got hassled all day long. He got hassled.
18:28But here in Uptown, it was a little bit more free, maybe a little bit more like the Wild West. You could get away with a lot more here.
18:39Free from all the rules and restrictions, the Uptown was a perfect fit for famous musicians and raucous concerts. So Jerry leased this grand old lady from its owners.
18:49On October 31st 1975, we presented our first concert here with Fee Waybill and the Tubes.
19:00And it was perfect for a rock and roll band. You would have the green room in back. You would have space for the band and the various hangers on.
19:09The band certainly wanted to play here because there weren't restrictions that stopped them from really putting on their very best show.
19:16And the fans love coming here just to take in the beauty of the theater, but also the fact that they were really so close to the stage no matter where you are.
19:26The sight lines, you know, sitting anywhere in this theater is really spectacular. The acoustics are perfect.
19:33So the Uptown Theater became one of the go to destinations for the top bands of the day.
19:40There's Grateful Dead stickers on the back of seats. There's an ode to Bruce Springsteen that's written on the women's bathroom stall.
19:50Sam Springsteen was always great here. The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, Frank Zappa. Genesis here was amazing. Electric Light Orchestra.
20:00All the shows that played here were top-notch performers on their way up.
20:07But the owners weren't living up to their end of the bargain.
20:11They extracted every penny that they could, but they never reinvested it back into the theater.
20:17And for a place like Uptown, that really was its death sentence.
20:20December 19, 1981, before I had to buy the oil to heat the theater because the owners couldn't afford to do it.
20:28And the bathrooms were barely functioning on the day of the show, and they decided to close it.
20:34The theater changed hands again, and the next owner really was just buying it as a salvage opportunity.
20:42They stripped out the plumbing and the fixtures, and they sold everything off that they could.
20:45In the mid-1990s, David and a friend got involved in trying to save the building from its slumlord owners.
20:57Unfortunately, they failed and neglected to heat the building.
21:02Where all these drain lines transitioned through the roof, they froze, they burst.
21:07Consequently, you had all that water cascading through the building.
21:10It was kind of heartbreaking to see the condition the building was in.
21:15This lobby was full of nothing but junk.
21:19While David managed to keep the building alive, an old face eventually returned with a plan to restore it to its former glory.
21:28I couldn't afford to buy it in 1981 or 82, and just waited until the opportunity came that I could acquire it, and it wasn't until 2008 that I finally put all the pieces together to make this work.
21:46And immediately started to put money into it to preserve it.
21:49The three original chandeliers were salvaged and are being kept in storage.
22:00By court order, they'll be refitted when the theatre's restoration work is 85% complete.
22:06With plans to bring rock bands back to its stage, David is waiting with bated breath for opening night.
22:16I've been here since 1996 trying to save this building and working on keeping it alive and maintaining it.
22:23Hopefully I'm in the front row and I'm going to rent a tuxedo and I'm going to pop a bottle of champagne and hopefully we're going to get there in my lifetime.
22:32In the Malaysian state of Perak sits a majestic ruin plagued by the ghosts of its past.
22:52This region is hot and it's humid and it's covered in rain forest, so when you see this grand building sitting in the middle of it all, it's a surprise.
23:00At first glance, it feels like the kind of castle you might expect to see in the Scottish Highlands.
23:07So what's it doing here in Malaysia?
23:10It's a strange blend of architecture. You have Scottish and Moorish and Italian influences.
23:16Some areas seem to be in pretty good condition, especially from the outside.
23:21But then there are other parts that look like they've been completely destroyed.
23:24One thing we can say for certain is this doesn't look like a stronghold built for defence.
23:31The inside, although bare, feels like it could have been someone's home.
23:35This site holds a tale of one man's ambition which rode a wave of colonial expansion.
23:45He arrived with a humble dream which could only be realised because of the might of the British Empire.
23:50It's a story that changed the course of history and it begins with a theft.
24:01In the jungles of Malaysia, legend has it that this place is haunted.
24:08Local resident Hakim is a believer.
24:10The ghost stories that surround this building were born of its turbulent past.
24:34There's a good reason this grand residence looks like it could be a Scottish castle.
24:41And that's because Scotland is where its story begins, with a man named William Smith.
24:47William Kelly Smith was born in 1870 to relative poverty.
24:52At the age of 20, he decided to seek his fortune on the other side of the world,
24:58in the British colony of Malaya, today known as Malaysia.
25:03This was an era when Europe was claiming overseas properties for their own
25:07and they did it with little regard to the native people.
25:10By the time William Smith arrived in the colony, it was well established and ripe for exploitation.
25:16Smith embarked on survey work as a civil engineer for a massive road building programme.
25:22With little competition, he quickly earned enough money to buy a plot of land.
25:29And Smith purchased a thousand acres of land where the house sits today.
25:34But he didn't yet have the funds to build it.
25:37All he had for years was a small wooden bungalow.
25:40He tried his luck at a few other businesses, which all failed.
25:44But with his next venture, marriage, he'd hit the jackpot.
25:47In 1903, he met 25-year-old Agnes, a wealthy heiress to a Liverpool cotton merchant family.
25:56After a whirlwind romance, they married and Smith came into £60,000 of Agnes's inheritance money.
26:04This was a vast fortune, the equivalent to around £6 million today.
26:09Agnes hated the wooden bungalow, so William starts to work on a brick house.
26:19It was complete by 1910 and was the beginning of what would become Kelly's Castle.
26:25Smith continued to frivolously invest his wife's inheritance into his many failing businesses, among them a coffee plantation, a sawmill and a dredging company.
26:38But with one venture, he would strike it lucky.
26:41Smith had previously started a rubber plantation, and now with the extra funds he could expand it, and soon he had the largest in the Batu Gajah area.
26:55What's fascinating about rubber, and you might not think there's much, is how rubber trees got to Malaya in the first place.
27:12It's a story that began with a theft.
27:17Rubber trees are native to the Amazon, and they didn't grow anywhere else.
27:21Brazil, for many years, had a complete world monopoly.
27:25The British weren't happy about this, and they started to try and smuggle seeds out of the country.
27:31But every attempt failed, as the seeds turned rancid before they got back to England.
27:35But in 1876, a man named Henry Wickham successfully transported 70,000 seeds back to London using banana skins.
27:46Once there, the botanists successfully germinated the seeds, which were then sent out to the colonies that had the right climate for them to thrive.
27:56Malaya was by far the most productive.
27:58This, coupled with the huge demand from the US automobile industry in the 1900s, created a massive boom in the rubber trade.
28:09Rubber was suddenly like gold, and money from Smith's plantation was pouring in.
28:16He began expanding his brick house into the home he'd always dreamed of.
28:21Work started in 1915, and William was desperate to make a statement to show that he was part of the colonial elite in Malaya.
28:32And in the Victorian era, to do that, you needed a castle estate.
28:37And William wanted his to be the biggest.
28:42Kelly's Castle was designed to incorporate Scottish, Moorish and Indian architectural elements, features which you can still see today.
28:50Ornate garages were packed full of the latest motor cars.
28:55Elaborate dining rooms, welcomed guests, and hosted lavish dinner parties.
29:01All maintained by an army of servants.
29:04The plan included 14 rooms, an indoor tennis court, a rooftop courtyard, a cellar, stables, and a six-story tower that would house Malaya's first elevator.
29:15At the time they served in the land for the town of Malaya, the house building was really
29:17very, very harsh and so on.
29:20And tech guests went and brought them to the tourists at the hotel house.
29:25So in the same time, the landlord was the most wonderful, the British house building.
29:28They were very garantized and we were very careful.
29:29They were very careful.
29:31Over the years we had to take the attention of the people of the village,
29:32such that they were very impatient.
29:34So in the place they were extremely talented.
29:35In the same time, the people of the broadcast was very amazing.
29:37More than 70 craftsmen from India were brought over to work on the castle.
29:40on the castle but construction was brought to a halt during world war one and just as the conflict
29:47ended in 1918 tragedy struck in november a spanish flu epidemic passed through malaya killing 35 000
29:56people many of them williams indian workers construction eventually got underway again
30:03but smith wouldn't live to see his castle completed he went to europe to visit his wife agnes and their
30:11son anthony who was attending boarding school there as part of the trip william went to lisbon
30:17with the intention of picking up his new elevator but while he was there he caught pneumonia and
30:23died at the age of 56. agnes was said to be so heartbroken that she never returned to malaya
30:30she sold the estate and kelly's castle was never completed it didn't take long for the jungle to
30:35take hold once again in 2000 the malaysian government restored the dilapidated old estate with the hopes
30:47that it would draw in tourists and it does but one of its main draws appears to be the many ghost stories
30:54that surround this place many visitors claim to feel a strange presence here
31:01some say it's the indian workers that died because of the spanish flu others think it's the restless
31:08spirit of william kelly smith prowling the floors of his unfinished mansion perhaps he just doesn't want
31:14strangers walking around in his home
31:22on the waters of san francisco bay is a facility that from great tragedy became the toast of a nation
31:31so we're on this peninsula jutting out into the bay with rolling tree-covered hills sloping down to the
31:42water you see these sprawling remains but it's hard to get a sense of what their purpose might have been
31:51and there's this vast red brick building with towers and crenellations it's like a castle
31:58this doesn't feel like somewhere that was actually used for fortifications
32:05the sheer enormity of the site suggests that whatever happened took place on a supersized scale
32:12there are these vast rooms with rows and rows of columns stretching out into the distance other
32:17areas are clearly being used for storage there's old cars and furniture and boxes on shelves
32:23just when you think that this was a civilian facility you start to see military rations and stretchers
32:32this was the brainchild of a man who wanted to revolutionize an industry
32:37at a time when san francisco was reduced to smoking rubble
32:41it was a massive investment a technical feat really but all of his efforts would be undone
32:49by a radical national reform overnight he goes from entrepreneur to criminal
33:00francis dinkelspiel is an author and journalist who has written extensively about the industry that
33:06made all this possible i first came to this place around 2010 i was working on a story for the new york
33:14times there was a controversy about the space and how it would be used and i was absolutely flabbergasted
33:21when i arrived it looked like an old medieval castle with turrets and towers this majestic structure
33:30has less to do with royalty and more to do with a national indulgence in the 1890s the california wine
33:39industry was a mess prices have been driven so low that wine makers and growers were barely breaking even
33:49people sort of thought of california wines as cheap not that reliable kind of tasted funky at times
33:56one man began a movement to transform california's dwindling wine industry and its reputation it was
34:04led by a rather unlikely figure an accountant from england who didn't seem to know anything about wine
34:11his name was percy morgan what he lacked in wine knowledge he made up for it in business smarts
34:18at the time san francisco was the beating heart of the industry due to its cool climate
34:24grapes from across the state were crushed and sent to wine houses in the city where they would be stored
34:30in large barrels to age and these facilities were all in fierce competition percy morgan came up with
34:39an idea to create sort of a mega corporation and so in 1894 he brought together seven wine houses in san
34:46francisco and they created the california wine association also known as the cwa they now had
34:54almost total control of the state's industry but an epic disaster threatened to derail their progress
35:01the 18th of april 1906 a massive 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit san francisco
35:13while the quake lasted less than a minute it ignited several fires across the city which burned for
35:20three days more than 3 000 people died and 80 of the city is destroyed among the rubble were a number
35:30of vital buildings owned by the california wine association out of nearly 30 only three of the
35:37city's commercial wine establishments survive around 10 million gallons of their wine was said to have been
35:45destroyed in the earthquake and the fires that followed it looks as if the state's wine industry
35:52has been destroyed beyond all repair but out of the ashes of this tragedy percy morgan sees another
36:00opportunity percy morgan said i'm not rebuilding all these plants i want to create one master winemaking
36:09facility he believed that if the cwa could rebuild in one big complex it would be more efficient and they
36:16could dominate the industry and so the cwa purchased 46 acres in point malady across the bay in san francisco
36:27to construct winehaven built in 1907 one year after the quake winehaven was operating as a one-stop shop
36:36for wine production so in harvest season in september and october tons and tons of grapes would be brought
36:46to winehaven they'd come from river boats down from napa they'd come from rail lines from the san joaquin valley
36:54and then they'd be loaded up on the internal rail system at winehaven and brought here to the main
37:00winemaking facility once crushed they'd be put into barrels to ferment in the central building
37:10you would see enormous barrels lining the walls there were so many redwood casks that people
37:17said there were four miles of passageways going between those railwood casks it could store 10 million
37:24gallons of wine you can't help but be impressed at this building it cost about six million dollars to
37:31construct it's full of steel and concrete this was a building that was constructed to last a long time
37:40by 1908 winehaven is fully operational and that year alone they produced 675 000 gallons of wine
37:48it was the largest winery in the world the scale was just tremendous its enormous size was complemented
37:57by its location strategically chosen for maximum impact morgan had been really smart in where he chose to
38:07build winehaven when the panama canal opened in 1914 the shipping lanes led right past winehaven and
38:15suddenly almost the entire world is within reach of the cwa winehaven was really a city-state not only
38:23were you know grapes brought here crushed here stored here winehaven made its own casks importing wood
38:30from louisiana for example it had its own bottling plant it had every sort of thing that was needed
38:38a workforce of skilled laborers from italy and beyond grew to 400 people during the harvest
38:46the company ensured everything was provided for staff including housing a post office and a school
38:55but there was a wave of change coming one that would transform the united states
39:03and threaten winehaven's very existence at the stroke of midnight on the 17th of january 1920
39:11the country went dry when prohibition was enforced across the nation this is the death knell for winehaven
39:21the workers at winehaven held a last lunch probably here on the loading dock
39:28they had been here for for more than a decade producing some of the greatest wine in the world and all
39:34of a sudden in the united states wine was mostly prohibited that was the end of a production of
39:41wine in winehaven percy morgan the man who did everything to make the california wine association
39:47the man who did everything to make the money to make the money to make the money to make the money
39:51i can only imagine how devastating this was for percy morgan here he was an upstanding citizen one of
39:58the most respected business people in california and all of a sudden a law declares that he was
40:04morally corrupt on the morning of april 16th 1920 still in his pajamas morgan walked into the library of
40:14his home and shot himself after winehaven was shut down its warehouses were still full of wine that
40:23they hadn't been able to sell and so stories are that they dumped a lot of this wine right here into the
40:30bay and that days afterwards it was really easy to catch fish who were so drunken from the wine that
40:37they just sort of laid there the california wine association sells off its assets to avoid bankruptcy
40:44and this giant facility is mothball despite prohibition ending in 1933
40:53it was only when the nation was at war that the building was utilized once more
41:00after the shock japanese attack at pearl harbor the united states was drawn into world war ii
41:06and winehaven was given a new lease of life the u.s navy bought the property and they turned it into
41:15a fuel storage facility for the pacific fleet when the war ended the navy continued to operate the site
41:24adapting the sellers to face a new national threat at the height of the cold war
41:29in the bowels of this property the navy set up a bomb shelter the remnants of which you can still see
41:36today they have drinking water they have cots they have commodes they have all the things you might
41:43need if you had to hide out from radiation for an extended period of time finally in 1995 the site was decommissioned
41:52after the navy withdrew from winehaven it became the property of the city of richmond
42:03there have been various proposals of things to do with the site uh at one point there was an idea of
42:09turning it into a casino complex but nothing ever really panned out and now the question remains
42:16will winehaven ever return to its roots in the last five to ten years there was a winemaker who
42:23was making wine at winehaven which was really exciting but nowadays it's mostly used as a storage facility
42:30but if you look closely you can see that some of these massive warehouses are being used to store wine
42:38once again
42:51you
42:52and
42:53and
42:54and
42:56and
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