#movie #hotdrama2026 #trending #bestmovie2026 #Mysteries of the Abandoned S13 Episode 7 Engsub - BEST MOVIE 2026
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00:01One man's eccentric vision in the jungles of Malaysia.
00:05Many of the locals are convinced that this site is haunted and it's not really surprising
00:10because this building has seen a lot of action and not all of it pleasant.
00:15A pioneering palace in Chicago, the largest of its kind in the world.
00:22It was IMAX before they even invented IMAX.
00:26And Nazi 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.
00:46In the German capital is a rare survivor of a time when the city resembled a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
00:59We're in the center of Berlin and in a public park, there is what appears to be a hill.
01:09And as you get closer, it has got a massive old building right in the middle of it.
01:17It's got these two really huge protrusions that kind of look like castles, but it's just a big hulking mess
01:24of concrete.
01:27Once you get inside, you realize there is much more to this place than is immediately visible above the ground.
01:34It seems to disappear into the earth.
01:39We are only getting a fractional glimpse at the size of it.
01:43You can see blasts, dings, chunks that have been ripped out of the concrete.
01:50When the enemy was at Berlin's doorstep, this structure became both a target and a lifeline.
01:57The city's inhabitants came streaming in to what was one of the last safe places in the city.
02:05These towers are the last thing keeping Berlin alive.
02:13But it wasn't soldiers manning the tower, it was women and children.
02:17The kids got as young as about 14 years old.
02:20Yet they would rather die than surrender.
02:23This became the final holdout in the last stand of the Third Reich.
02:37The first time I came in here, I had already built it up in my head.
02:41And even that didn't live up in the slightest to what we were actually seeing.
02:47Athena Karens works for an organization that has unearthed hidden layers of this structure.
02:53The scale of this building when it was still standing is almost impossible to comprehend.
02:57For decades, it sat as an inaccessible hunk of concrete on top of this park.
03:05Surrounding it were tales of rumors from Berlin's darkest days under the Nazi regime.
03:13Hermann Göring, the commander of the Luftwaffe, promised the people of Germany that Berlin would never be bombed.
03:25But early in the Second World War, a mistake by a German pilot started a chain reaction that proved Göring
03:34wrong.
03:35On the 24th of August, 1940, a German bomber gets lost.
03:41It accidentally drops a rack of bombs onto London.
03:48Revenge is swift.
03:50British Prime Minister Winston Churchill immediately orders the Royal Air Force to retaliate.
03:56That first night, only 22 planes actually made it to Berlin.
04:01Most get lost in bad weather and miss their targets.
04:05The only damage inflicted is to kill an elephant at Berlin Zoo.
04:09Yet it proves British bombers have the range to strike the German capital.
04:16It was enough to break the illusion that Berlin was safe.
04:21And the vulnerability of Berlin was exposed incredibly quickly.
04:24And in order to protect the city, the Nazis build massive anti-aircraft towers.
04:34The German word for anti-aircraft is Fliegerabwehrkanone, anti-aircraft cannons.
04:42And that shortens to flak.
04:45These were flak towers, flak turma.
04:50This is the Humboldtine Flak Tower.
04:54Its design reflects Hitler's specific whim.
04:58Which he sketched on a scrap of paper.
05:05These towers were originally meant to deter planes from coming near the center of the city.
05:10And the idea that Hitler had in his mind was something a bit like a medieval castle.
05:15They take thousands of soldiers and hundreds of POWs to build these towers in just less than six months.
05:26Six stories high, the four towers were topped with flak guns and anti-aircraft machine guns.
05:34The dream was partially to show the military might of his empire, but also to actually serve a military purpose.
05:42In late 1943, Allied bombers shift their focus from industrial districts to civilian neighborhoods.
05:51The Flak Tower is called into action on an almost daily basis.
05:58People may be more familiar with the bombing of London, known as the Blitz.
06:02But in terms of numbers, it doesn't compare with the bombardment of German cities.
06:08Those people defending this Flak Tower witnessed 363 air raids strike Berlin.
06:16People who were in this building during air raids said that it kind of felt like being at a ship
06:21at sea.
06:21Even though it was a massive concrete building secured on an 84-meter sand bed, still it rocked with the
06:29guns.
06:30As bombing intensified, citizens sought refuge from the Allied onslaught.
06:36In addition to serving as flak towers, this is going to be a perfect place for an air raid shelter.
06:44Slices of Berlin life had to move into the Humboldt-Hein Flak Tower.
06:50There were children who were going to school.
06:54There were maternity hospitals.
06:56It was the only safe place in Berlin to give birth.
07:02The Allies were tightening the noose around Berlin.
07:05So the Nazis shipped out every soldier available to the front lines.
07:12For every man that they sent out, they brought in about eight children.
07:15The way that they sold this to the parents is they say,
07:18here they'll be safe, they'll be in a bomb-proof building,
07:21they'll still do their 18 hours of school a week.
07:24But during the night, they will be heroes of the Reich, they will be defending our city.
07:28The official title of these children who were working and fighting here were the Luftwaffehilfen,
07:34the Air Force helpers.
07:36Let's call them what they were. They were child soldiers.
07:39These kids were about to come up against an army, thirsty for revenge.
07:50Berlin, April 1945.
07:55Soviet troops are the first of the Allied forces to arrive at the city's doorstep.
08:00On the 16th, they cross the Oder River.
08:04The Battle of Berlin has begun.
08:07But the mass of Berlin's defense was teenagers, old people, women who'd been brought in to fire anti-aircraft guns.
08:19They were given a hasty preparation, handed a weapon, and being told,
08:25the Russians are coming, start shooting.
08:30As the Soviets got even closer to the city, many Berliners, many of whom were already homeless,
08:36started flooding into the Flak Tower.
08:37This building that was originally designed to only host about 15,000 civilians regularly had up to 50,000.
08:46The Humboldtine Flak Tower was targeted as a major obstacle to Soviet advances into the center of the city.
08:54You can only imagine the deafening sound of bombs and artillery hitting the walls.
09:00It must have felt like the whole place was going to collapse in on you.
09:06Despite a barrage of artillery, the towers, with their eight feet thick reinforced concrete walls, held firm.
09:15But Berlin was crumbling around them, and Hitler saw the writing on the wall.
09:21The Humboldtine is not far from Hitler's bunker.
09:25And when the news came that Hitler had killed himself, that the Führer was dead, they lost the ability to
09:34cope.
09:36The Soviets were particularly brutalized by Nazi ideology.
09:40The men coming in here did have revenge on their mind, which also led to large swaths of suicides,
09:47particularly among women and girls, many of whom threw themselves down the spiral staircase
09:52instead of living in a world where they had lost.
09:56But their sons and brothers, the young boys left behind, refused to lay down their arms.
10:05Even after Hitler kills himself, even after Berlin surrenders, these towers just keep on fighting.
10:15They hold out for another day after the city garrison had surrendered.
10:19But finally, Soviet troops take the building on May 3, 1945.
10:26One of the few structures remaining, over 80% of the city, has been leveled.
10:35After World War II, Berlin was divided into different sectors.
10:39The French are going to control the sector that has these flak towers.
10:43Their attempt to demolish them only partially succeeds, leaving two of the four towers standing.
10:52And they rapidly determine that they cannot realistically destroy the flak tower without destroying Berlin around it.
11:03So the French decide to bury it.
11:08Berlin was massively destroyed, so rubble from across the entire French sector was piled up to make a small mountain
11:15atop of the building.
11:16And that is what we see today.
11:18At the time it was simply a pile of rubble, but over the years it's become covered with topsoil, with
11:23trees, with bushes.
11:25And now it is a beautiful park with this massive relic in the middle.
11:34For decades, people wanted to forget the horrors of the war, and the tower's legacy remained buried.
11:41Until the Berlin Underworlds Association began digging.
11:45A historical society found an entranceway in the rubble, and an entire subterranean world opened up.
11:54They began to lead the public into these fated hallways for the first time in 60 years.
12:08In a busy neighborhood of North Chicago, an ornate structure stands out from the crowd.
12:21On one of these streets we see this massive facade with the word uptown emblazoned on it.
12:28When you step into this place, it's almost like you're being transported into another world.
12:34There's grand columns that are reaching into the ceiling.
12:37There's relief carvings everywhere you look in a sweeping staircase in the lobby.
12:43There are thousands of upholstered chairs facing a grand stage.
12:48This was a place to entertain.
12:50Once the jewel in the city's crown, it was the largest of its kind in the world.
12:56But a reckoning was coming that would bring this party to an end, and ultimately make way for a new
13:03one.
13:04One man saw the opportunity to bring new life into this building.
13:09You walk into this place and you can't help but fall in love with it.
13:13A new era saw the volume cranked up to 11.
13:18All the shows that played here were top-notch performers on their way up.
13:29David Sivchik has been a custodian of this historic building for nearly 30 years.
13:36But he first visited as a young boy in the late 1950s.
13:42We'd come see the feature films with my parents.
13:46I would come here, order my popcorn, and through the windows here, I could still watch the film.
13:54This was still the golden age of Hollywood, a time when the movie theater was king.
14:01In these days before television, movies played a huge role in people's lives, especially people who lived in cities like
14:08this.
14:09People were going to the movies as much as three times a week, and sometimes they would sit through a
14:13double feature.
14:14In this heyday of films, lavish theaters were popping up across the country.
14:21And I'm of the age where every theater was a movie palace.
14:25So I was under the impression that every neighborhood had one of these.
14:30Little did I know how special this building actually was.
14:34This is the Uptown Theater.
14:39It opened in 1925 to great fanfare.
14:44To mark the occasion, the entire city turned out.
14:47There were two whole weeks of parades, and 12,000 people were out on the streets.
14:53This theater had seating for 4,500 people, making it the biggest movie theater in the world at the time
15:00it opened.
15:01There were 131 full-time employees here.
15:05Not a single expense was spared.
15:07The lobby, for example, was modeled after the Palace of Versailles.
15:12So as you entered the grand lobby here, immediately your eyeballs popped out at the opulence of the theater.
15:19The chandeliers alone cost $30,000 back in 1925 when it opened.
15:25That would be something like half a million today.
15:28At one point there was even a Rembrandt hanging on one of the walls.
15:32The auditorium is so vast that the screen was 60 by 30, so it was IMAX before they even invented
15:38IMAX.
15:39The building as a whole was designed to function as a one-stop shop.
15:44This was built for an urban, pedestrian, streetcar-riding population.
15:52So they had amenities. They had a nursery.
15:55You could drop your kids off and go see an afternoon matinee.
15:59Can you imagine people doing that today? It's just inconceivable.
16:04For decades, the uptown theater thrived and was at the heart of the local community.
16:11But the popularity of home television sets in the 1950s was compounded by dramatic changes to theater building.
16:20The priority was now on quantity, not quality.
16:24It was hard for them to compete with a multiplex built out by the interstate somewhere that might have 8
16:31or 12 screens.
16:33This shift in movie-going made these really lavish places like the uptown completely obsolete.
16:42But one young entrepreneur saw an opportunity in its fading grandeur and would breathe it new life.
16:50Some of the biggest names in entertainment have stood on that stage.
17:02In 1975, Jerry Mickelson, the current owner and music promoter, discovered Chicago's uptown movie theater.
17:11Though largely unused, its original grandeur still shone through.
17:17You walk into this place and you can't help but fall in love with it.
17:21The lobby is spectacular.
17:23I got married in the lobby.
17:26Jerry was searching for a theater that could host top bands and rock concerts
17:32without the restrictions he encountered in the center of Chicago.
17:36Originally, we started downtown at some beautiful old theaters,
17:40but the old theaters became very restrictive with who they would let in to play at their venues.
17:47Chicago had a lot of rules.
17:49The stagehands had to belong to the union.
17:51The police were keeping an eye on illicit activity.
17:55There were noise ordinances.
17:57When Bob Marley came into a downtown theater, the people that owned the theater went nuts
18:02because as soon as he walked in, they're smoking ganja.
18:05We got hassled all day long. He got hassled.
18:08But here in Uptown, it was a little bit more free, maybe a little bit more like the Wild West.
18:14You could get away with a lot more here.
18:18Free of all the rules and restrictions, the Uptown was a perfect fit for famous musicians and raucous concerts.
18:25So Jerry leased this grand old lady from its owners.
18:30On October 31st, 1975, we presented our first concert here with Fee Waybill and the Tubes.
18:38And it was perfect for a rock and roll band.
18:41You would have the green room in back.
18:44You would have space for the band and the various hangers on.
18:48The band certainly wanted to play here because there weren't restrictions
18:51that stopped them from really putting on their very best show.
18:55And the fans love coming here just to take in the beauty of the theater,
18:59but also the fact that they were really so close to the stage, no matter where you are.
19:05The sight lines, you know, sitting anywhere in this theater is really spectacular.
19:10The acoustics are perfect.
19:13So the Uptown Theater became one of the go-to destinations for the top bands of the day.
19:20There's Grateful Dead stickers on the back of seats.
19:23There's an ode to Bruce Springsteen that's written on the women's bathroom stall.
19:29Seeing Springsteen was always great here.
19:32The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, Frank Zappa.
19:35I mean, all the shows that played here were top-notch performers on their way up.
19:40But the owners weren't living up to their end of the bargain.
19:45They extracted every penny that they could, but they never reinvested it back into the theater.
19:50And for a place like Uptown, that really was its death sentence.
19:55December 19th, 1981, before I had to buy the oil to heat the theater,
19:59because the owners couldn't afford to do it,
20:01and the bathrooms were barely functioning on the day of the show,
20:05and they decided to close it.
20:07The theater changed hands again, and the next owner really was just buying it as a salvage opportunity.
20:16They stripped out the plumbing and the fixtures, and they sold everything off that they could.
20:22In the mid-1990s, David and a friend got involved in trying to save the building from its slumlord owners.
20:32Unfortunately, they failed and neglected to heat the building.
20:36There were all these drain lines transitioned through the roof.
20:39They froze. They burst.
20:41Consequently, you had all that water cascading through the building.
20:45It was kind of heartbreaking to see the condition the building was in.
20:49This lobby was full of nothing but junk.
20:53While David managed to keep the building alive, an old face eventually returned with a plan to restore it to
21:01its former glory.
21:04I couldn't afford to buy it in 1981.
21:06It wasn't until 2008 that I finally put all the pieces together to make this work.
21:13And immediately started to put money into it to preserve it.
21:22The three original chandeliers were salvaged and are being kept in storage.
21:28By court order, they'll be refitted when the theater's restoration work is 85% complete.
21:35With plans to bring rock bands back to its stage, David is waiting with bated breath for opening night.
21:44I've been here since 1996 trying to save this building and working on keeping it alive and maintaining it.
21:51Hopefully I'm in the front row and I'm going to rent a tuxedo and I'm going to pop a bottle
21:57of champagne and hopefully we're going to get there in my lifetime.
22:05In the Malaysian state of Perak sits a majestic ruin plagued by the ghosts of its past.
22:20This region is hot and it's humid and it's covered in rain forest.
22:24So when you see this grand building sitting in the middle of it all, it's a surprise.
22:29At first glance, it feels like the kind of castle you might expect to see in the Scottish Highlands.
22:35So what's it doing here in Malaysia?
22:38It's a strange blend of architecture.
22:40You have Scottish and Moorish and Italian influences.
22:44Some areas seem to be in pretty good condition, especially from the outside.
22:48But then there are other parts that look like they've been completely destroyed.
22:53One thing we can say for certain is this doesn't look like a stronghold built for defence.
22:59The inside, although bare, feels like it could have been someone's home.
23:05This site holds a tale of one man's ambition, which rode a wave of colonial expansion.
23:13He arrived with a humble dream, which could only be realised because of the might of the British Empire.
23:19It's a story that changed the course of history, and it begins with a theft.
23:31In the jungles of Malaysia, legend has it that this place is haunted.
23:36Local resident Hakim is a believer.
23:41When I first came here, I felt that there was something here.
23:49Something that was watching me from afar.
23:52I felt eyes on me.
23:59The ghost stories that surround this building are born out of its turbulent past.
24:06There's a good reason this grand residence looks like it could be a Scottish castle.
24:11And that's because Scotland is where its story begins, with a man named William Smith.
24:17William Kelly Smith was born in 1870 to relative poverty.
24:23At the age of 20, he decided to seek his fortune on the other side of the world,
24:28in the British colony of Malaya, today known as Malaysia.
24:34This was an era when Europe was claiming overseas properties for their own,
24:37and they did it with little regard to the native people.
24:39By the time William Smith arrived in the colony, it was well established and ripe for exploitation.
24:47Smith embarked on survey work as a civil engineer for a massive road building program.
24:54With little competition, he quickly earned enough money to buy a plot of land.
25:00And Smith purchased a thousand acres of land where the house sits today.
25:04But he didn't yet have the funds to build it.
25:07All he had for years was a small wooden bungalow.
25:10He tried his luck at a few other businesses, which all failed.
25:14But with his next venture, marriage, he'd hit the jackpot.
25:18In 1903, he met 25-year-old Agnes, a wealthy heiress to a Liverpool cotton merchant family.
25:26After a whirlwind romance, they married, and Smith came into $300,000 of Agnes's inheritance money.
25:35This was a vast fortune, the equivalent to around $10 million today.
25:43Based on what I understand about Mr William, he was very protective of his family.
25:50Also, he would do anything for the comfort of his wife and children.
25:57Agnes hated the wooden bungalows, so William starts work on a brick house.
26:01It was complete by 1910, and was the beginning of what would become Kelly's Castle.
26:10Smith continued to frivolously invest his wife's inheritance into his many failing businesses, among them a coffee plantation, sawmill, and
26:19dredging company.
26:20But with one venture, he would strike it lucky.
26:25Smith had previously started a rubber plantation, and now, with the extra funds, he could expand it.
26:31And soon, he had the largest in the Batu Gajar area.
26:35What's fascinating about rubber, and you might not think there's much, is how rubber trees got to Malaya in the
26:41first place.
26:42It's a story that began with a theft.
26:46Rubber trees are native to the Amazon, and they didn't grow anywhere else.
26:50Brazil, for many years, had a complete world monopoly.
26:55The British weren't happy about this, and they started to try and smuggle seeds out of the country.
27:00But every attempt failed, as the seeds turned rancid before they got back to England.
27:05But in 1876, a man named Henry Wickham successfully transported 70,000 seeds back to London, using banana skins.
27:16Once there, the botanists successfully germinated the seeds, which were then sent out to the colonies that had the right
27:24climate for them to thrive.
27:26Malaya was by far the most productive.
27:30This, coupled with the huge demand from the U.S. automobile industry in the 1900s, created a massive boom in
27:37the rubber trade.
27:39Rubber was suddenly like gold, and money from Smith's plantation was pouring in.
27:46He began expanding his brick house into the home he'd always dreamed of.
27:52Work started in 1915, and William was desperate to make a statement to show that he was part of the
27:59colonial elite in Malaya.
28:01And in the Victorian era, to do that, you needed a castle estate.
28:06And William wanted his to be the biggest.
28:11Kelly's Castle was designed to incorporate Scottish, Moorish, and Indian architectural elements, features which you can still see today.
28:20Ornate garages were packed full of the latest motorcars.
28:24Elaborate dining rooms welcomed guests and hosted lavish dinner parties, all maintained by an army of servants.
28:35The plan included 14 rooms, an indoor tennis court, a rooftop courtyard, a cellar, stables, and a six-story tower
28:43that would house Malaya's first elevator.
28:50So at the time, to build such a mansion in Malaya was a grand and novel thing.
28:56It became such a marvel to people around here.
29:00It invoked that feeling of wow.
29:06More than 70 craftsmen from India were brought over to work on the castle.
29:11But this workforce would soon be decimated by a global pandemic, which would rip through the region.
29:24In 1915, William Kelly Smith began work on his dream castle in Malaysia, then the British colony of Malaya.
29:33Construction was brought to a halt during World War I.
29:37And just as the conflict ended in 1918, tragedy struck.
29:42In November, a Spanish flu epidemic passed through Malaya, killing 35,000 people, many of them William's Indian workers.
29:52Construction eventually got underway again, but Smith wouldn't live to see his castle completed.
30:00He went to Europe to visit his wife, Agnes, and their son, Anthony, who was attending boarding school there.
30:06As part of the trip, William went to Lisbon with the intention of picking up his new elevator.
30:12But while he was there, he caught pneumonia and died at the age of 56.
30:18Agnes was said to be so heartbroken that she never returned to Malaya.
30:21She sold the estate and Kelly's castle was never completed.
30:25And it didn't take long for the jungle to take hold once again.
30:33In 2000, the Malaysian government restored the dilapidated old estate with the hopes that it would draw in tourists.
30:40And it does.
30:42But one of its main draws appears to be the many ghost stories that surround this place.
30:47Many visitors claim to feel a strange presence here.
30:53Some say it's the Indian workers that died because of the Spanish flu.
30:57Others think it's the restless spirit of William Kelly Smith prowling the floors of his unfinished mansion.
31:04Perhaps he just doesn't want strangers walking around in his home.
31:15On the waters of San Francisco Bay is a facility that from great tragedy became the toast of a nation.
31:27So we're on this peninsula jetting out into the bay with rolling tree covered hills sloping down to the water.
31:35You see these sprawling remains, but it's hard to get a sense of what their purpose might have been.
31:42And there's this vast red brick building with towers and crenellations. It's like a castle.
31:49This doesn't feel like somewhere that was actually used for fortifications.
31:56The sheer size of the site suggests that whatever happened took place on a supersized scale.
32:03There are these vast rooms with rows and rows of columns stretching out into the distance.
32:08Other areas are clearly being used for storage. There's old cars and furniture and boxes on shelves.
32:16Just when you think that this was a civilian facility, you start to see military rations and stretchers.
32:23This complex was the brainchild of a man who wanted to revolutionize an industry at a time when San Francisco
32:30was reduced to smoking rubble.
32:33It was a massive investment, a technical feat, really.
32:38But all of his efforts would be undone by a radical national reform.
32:43Overnight, he goes from entrepreneur to criminal.
32:51Frances Dinkelspiel is an author and journalist who has written extensively about the industry that made all this possible.
32:59I was working on a story for the New York Times.
33:03There was a controversy about the space and how it would be used.
33:07And I was absolutely flabbergasted when I arrived.
33:10It looked like an old medieval castle.
33:14This majestic structure has less to do with royalty and more to do with a national indulgence.
33:22In the 1890s, the California wine industry was a mess.
33:27Prices have been driven so low that winemakers and growers were barely breaking even.
33:34People sort of thought of California wines as cheap, not that reliable, kind of tasted funky at times.
33:42One man would start a movement to transform California's dwindling wine industry and its reputation.
33:49It was led by a rather unlikely figure, an accountant from England who didn't seem to know anything about wine.
33:57His name was Percy Morgan.
33:59What he lacked in wine knowledge, he made up for it in business smarts.
34:03At the time, San Francisco was the beating heart of the industry due to its cool climate.
34:09Grapes from across the state were crushed and sent to wine houses in the city, where they would be stored
34:15in large barrels to age.
34:17And these wine houses were all in fierce competition.
34:22Percy Morgan came up with an idea to create sort of a mega corporation.
34:27And so in 1894, he brought together seven wine houses in San Francisco and they created the California Wine Association.
34:36Also known as the CWA, they now had almost total control of the state's industry.
34:44But an epic disaster threatened to derail their progress.
34:49April 18th, 1906.
34:52A massive 7.9 magnitude earthquake hit San Francisco.
34:57While the quake lasts less than a minute, it ignites several fires across the city, which burn for three days.
35:06More than 3000 people died and 80% of the city is destroyed.
35:12Among the rubble are a number of vital buildings owned by the California Wine Association.
35:18Out of nearly 30, only three of the city's commercial wine establishments survive.
35:24Around 10 million gallons of their wine was said to have been destroyed in the earthquake and the fires that
35:32followed.
35:34It looks as if the state's wine industry has been destroyed beyond all repair.
35:39But out of the ashes of this tragedy, Percy Morgan sees another opportunity.
35:46Percy Morgan said, I'm not rebuilding all these plants.
35:50I want to create one master winemaking facility.
35:54He believed that if the CWA could rebuild in one big complex, it would be more efficient and they could
36:01dominate the industry.
36:03And so the CWA purchased 46 acres at Point Milady across the bay in San Francisco to construct Wine Haven.
36:13Built in 1907, one year after the fire, Wine Haven was a state of the art facility.
36:20You can't help but be impressed at this building.
36:24It cost about $6 million to construct.
36:27It was the largest winery in the world.
36:30It could store 10 million gallons of wine.
36:34Its enormous size was complemented by its location, strategically chosen for maximum impact.
36:42Morgan had been really smart in where he chose to build Wine Haven.
36:48When the Panama Canal opened in 1914, the shipping lanes led right past Wine Haven.
36:54And suddenly, almost the entire world is within reach of the CWA.
36:58Wine Haven was really a city-state.
37:01Not only were, you know, grapes brought here, crushed here, stored here.
37:06Wine Haven made its own casks, importing wood from Louisiana, for example.
37:11It had its own bottling plant.
37:14A workforce of skilled laborers hailing from Italy and beyond swelled to 400 people during the harvest.
37:22The company made sure there was everything for staff, including housing, a post office, and a school.
37:28But there was a wave of change coming.
37:32One that would transform the United States and threaten Wine Haven's very existence.
37:44Constructed in 1907, Wine Haven was the biggest winery in the world.
37:49But little more than a decade later, radical reform brought it to its knees.
37:57At the stroke of midnight on January 17, 1920, the country goes dry when prohibition is enforced across the nation.
38:07This is the death knell for Wine Haven.
38:10The workers at Wine Haven held a last lunch, probably here on the loading dock.
38:18They had been here for more than a decade, producing some of the greatest wine in the world, and all
38:24of a sudden, in the United States, wine was mostly prohibited.
38:28That was the end of a production of wine in Wine Haven.
38:33Percy Morgan, the man who did everything to make the California Wine Association successful, was inconsolable.
38:41Here he was, an upstanding citizen, one of the most respected business people in California, and all of a sudden,
38:48a law declared that he was morally corrupt.
38:51On the morning of April 16, 1920, still in his pajamas, Morgan walked into the library of his home and
39:02shot himself.
39:05After Wine Haven was shut down, its warehouses were still full of wine that they hadn't been able to sell.
39:10And so, stories are that they dumped a lot of this wine right here into the bay.
39:17And that days afterwards, it was really easy to catch fish who were so drunken from the wine that they
39:23just sort of laid there.
39:25The California Wine Association sells off its assets to avoid bankruptcy.
39:30And this giant facility is mothballed.
39:35Despite prohibition ending in 1933, it was only when the nation was at war that the building was utilized once
39:43more.
39:45After the surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, the United States is drawn into World War II.
39:51And Wine Haven is given a new lease on life.
39:56The U.S. Navy bought the property and they turned it into a fuel storage facility for the Pacific Fleet.
40:05When the war ends, the Navy continues to operate the site, adapting the cellars against a new national threat during
40:13the height of the Cold War.
40:15In the bowels of this property, the Navy set up a bomb shelter, the remnants of which you can still
40:22see today.
40:22They have drinking water, they have cots, they have commodes, they have all the things you might need if you
40:30had to hide out from radiation for an extended period of time.
40:35Finally, in 1995, the site was decommissioned.
40:43After the Navy withdrew from Wine Haven, it became the property of the city of Richmond.
40:49There have been various proposals of things to do with the site.
40:53At one point, there was an idea of turning it into a casino complex, but nothing ever really panned out.
41:00And now the question remains, will Wine Haven ever return to its roots?
41:05In the last five to ten years, there was a winemaker who was making wine at Wine Haven, which was
41:12really exciting.
41:13But nowadays, it's mostly used as a storage facility.
41:17But if you look closely, you can see that some of these massive warehouses are being used to store wine
41:24once again.
41:30No resof dancing, there's no maiscronome sun, then the car is swinging into the crilling but when it's on its
41:31forte team it's matured time.
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