Original subtitles

[narrator] One man's eccentric vision in the jungles of Malaysia.

[Rose] Many of the locals are convinced

that the site is haunted and it's not really surprising

because this building has seen a lot of action

and not all of it pleasant.

A pioneering palace in Chicago,

the largest of its kind in the world.

It was IMAX before they even invented IMAX.

And Nazi towers in Berlin, defended to the bitter end

by the only fighters left in town.

[muzzle blasts]

[Kerins] Let's call them what they were --

they were child soldiers.

[enigmatic music playing]

[mysterious music playing]

In the German capital is a rare survivor of a time

when the city resembled a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

[mysterious music playing]

[Dr. Nusbacher] We'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.

[Dr. Landdeck] It's got these two really huge protrusions

that kind of look like castles,

but it's just a big, hulking mass of concrete.

[Selwood] Once you get inside, you realize

there is much more to this place than is immediately visible

above the ground.

It seems to disappear into the earth.

We are only getting a fractional glimpse

at the size of it.

[Dr. Nusbacher] You can see blasts, dings,

chunks that have been ripped out of the concrete.

When the enemy was at Berlin's doorstep,

this structure became both a target and a lifeline.

[Selwood] The city's inhabitants came streaming in to what was

one of the last safe places in the city.

These towers are the last thing keeping Berlin alive.

But it wasn't soldiers manning the tower.

It was women and children.

The kids got as young as about 14 years old.

Yet they would rather die than surrender.

This became the final holdout in the last stand

of the Third Reich.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Kerins] The first time I came in here,

I'd already built it up in my head,

and even that didn't live up in the slightest

to what we were actually seeing.

Athena Kerins works for an organization

that has unearthed hidden layers

of this structure.

The scale of this building when it was still standing

is almost impossible to comprehend.

For decades,

it sat as an inaccessible hunk of concrete

on top of this park.

Surrounding it were tales of rumors

from Berlin's darkest days under the Nazi regime.

[Dr. Nusbacher] Hermann Goering,

the commander of the Luftwaffe,

promised the people of Germany

that Berlin would never be bombed.

But early in the Second World War,

a mistake by a German pilot started a chain reaction

that proved Goering wrong.

On the 24th of August, 1940, a German bomber gets lost.

It accidentally drops a rack of bombs onto London.

Revenge is swift.

British prime minister, Winston Churchill,

immediately orders the Royal Air Force to retaliate.

That first night, only 22 planes actually made it to Berlin.

Most get lost in bad weather and miss their targets.

The only damage inflicted is to kill an elephant

at Berlin zoo.

Yet it proves British bombers have the range to strike

the German capital.

It was enough to break the illusion

that Berlin was safe,

and the vulnerability of Berlin was exposed incredibly quickly.

[Dr. Nusbacher] And in order to protect the city,

the Nazis build massive anti-aircraft towers.

The German word for anti-aircraft is

Fliegerabwehrkanone, anti-aircraft cannons,

and that shortens to flak.

These were flak towers -- Flaktürme.

This is the Humboldthain Flak Tower.

Its design reflects Hitler's specific whim,

which he sketched on a scrap of paper.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Kerins] These towers were originally meant to deter planes

from coming near the center of the city,

and the idea that Hitler had in his mind

was something a bit like a medieval castle.

They take thousands of soldiers and hundreds of POWs

to build these towers in just less than six months.

Six stories high, the four towers

were topped with flak guns and anti-aircraft machine guns.

[Kerins] The dream was partially to show the military might

of his empire,

but also to actually serve a military purpose.

In late 1943, Allied bombers shift their focus

from industrial districts to civilian neighborhoods.

The flak tower is called into action

on an almost daily basis.

[Selwood] People 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.

Those people defending this flak tower

witnessed 363 air raids strike Berlin.

[Kerins] People 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.

As bombing intensified, citizens sought refuge

from the Allied onslaught.

In addition to serving as flak towers,

this is going to be a perfect place

for an air raid shelter.

[Dr. Nusbacher] Slices of Berlin life had to move

into the Humboldthain Flak Tower.

There were children who were going to school.

There were maternity hospitals.

It was the only safe place in Berlin to give birth.

The Allies were tightening the noose around Berlin,

so the Nazis shipped out every soldier available

to the front lines.

[enigmatic music playing]

For every man that they sent out,

they brought in about eight children.

The way that they sold this to the parents is they say,

"Here they'll be safe,

"they'll be in a bomb-proof building,

"they'll still do their 18 hours of school a week,

"but during the night they will be heroes of the Reich,

they will be defending our city."

The official title of these children

who were working and fighting here were the Luftwaffenhelfer,

the Air Force Helpers.

Let's call them what they were --

they were child soldiers.

These kids were about to come up against

an army thirsty for revenge.

[enigmatic music playing]

Berlin, April 1945.

Soviet troops are the first of the Allied forces

to arrive at the city's doorstep.

On the 16th, they cross the Óder River.

The Battle of Berlin has begun.

[Dr. Nusbacher] But the mass of Berlin's defense

was teenagers, old people,

women who'd been brought in to fire anti-aircraft guns.

They were given a hasty preparation,

handed a weapon, and being told, "The Russians are coming.

Start shooting."

[Kerins] As the soviets got even closer to the city,

many Berliners, many of whom were already homeless,

started flooding into the flak tower.

This building that was originally designed

to only host about 15,000 civilians

regularly had up to 50,000.

The Humboldthain Flak Tower was targeted

as a major obstacle to Soviet advances

into the center of the city.

[Selwood] You can only imagine the deafening sound of bombs

and artillery hitting the walls.

It must have felt like the whole place

was gonna collapse in on you.

Despite a barrage of artillery, the towers,

with their eight feet thick reinforced concrete walls,

held firm.

But Berlin was crumbling around them,

and Hitler saw the writing on the wall.

[Dr. Nusbacher] The Humboldthain

is not far from Hitler's bunker.

And when the news came that Hitler had killed himself,

that the Führer was dead, they lost the ability to cope.

[Kerins] The Soviets were particularly brutalized by Nazi ideology.

The men coming in here did have revenge on their mind,

which also led to large swaths of suicides,

particularly among women and girls,

many of whom threw themselves down the spiral staircase

instead of living in a world where they had lost.

But their sons and brothers, the young boys left behind,

refused to lay down their arms.

[Dr. Nusbacher] Even after Hitler kills himself,

even after Berlin surrenders,

these towers just keep on fighting.

They hold out for another day

after the city garrison had surrendered.

But finally,

Soviet troops take the building on May 3, 1945.

One of the few structures remaining,

over 80% of the city, has been leveled.

[mournful music playing]

[Dr. Landdeck] After World War II,

Berlin was divided into different sectors.

The French are gonna control the sector

that has these flak towers.

Their attempt to demolish them only partially succeeds,

leaving two of the four towers standing.

And they rapidly determine

that they cannot realistically destroy the flak tower

without destroying Berlin around it.

So the French decide to bury it.

[Kerins] Berlin was massively destroyed,

so rubble from across the entire French sector

was piled up to make a small mountain

atop of the building, and that is what we see today.

At the time, it was simply a pile of rubble,

but over the years, it's become covered

with topsoil, with trees, with bushes,

and now it is a beautiful park

with this massive relic in the middle.

[enigmatic music playing]

For decades,

people wanted to forget the horrors of the war,

and the tower's legacy remained buried...

until the Berlin Underworlds Association began digging.

A historical society found an entranceway in the rubble,

and an entire subterranean world opened up.

They began to lead the public into these fated hallways

for the first time in 60 years.

[enigmatic music playing]

[mysterious music playing]

In a busy neighborhood of North Chicago,

an ornate structure stands out from the crowd.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Meigs] On one of these streets, we see this massive facade

with the word "Uptown" emblazoned on it.

[Gutierrez-Romine] When you step into this place,

it's almost like you're being transported into another world.

[Meares] There's grand columns

that are reaching into the ceiling.

There's relief carvings everywhere you look

and a sweeping staircase in the lobby.

[Gutierrez-Romine] There are thousands

of upholstered chairs facing a grand stage.

This was a place to entertain.

Once the jewel in the city's crown,

it was the largest of its kind in the world.

[Gutierrez-Romine] But a reckoning was coming

that would bring this party to an end

and ultimately make way for a new one.

[Meares] One man saw the opportunity

to bring new life into this building.

[Mickelson] You walk into this place

and you can't help but fall in love with it.

A new era saw the volume cranked up to 11.

All the shows that played here were top-notch performers

on their way up.

[enigmatic music playing]

[mysterious music playing]

David Syfczak has been a custodian

of this historic building for nearly 30 years.

But he first visited as a young boy

in the late 1950s.

[Syfczak] We'd come see the feature films with my parents.

I would come here, order my popcorn,

and through the windows here, I could still watch the film.

[awe-inspiring music playing]

This was still the golden age of Hollywood,

a time when the movie theater was king.

[Meigs] In these days before television,

movies played a huge role in people's lives,

especially people who lived in cities like this.

People were going to the movies as much as three times a week,

and sometimes they would sit through a double feature.

In this heyday of films, lavish theaters were popping up

across the country.

And I'm of the age where every theater

was a movie palace.

So I was under the impression

that every neighborhood had one of these.

Little did I know how special this building actually was.

This is the Uptown Theatre

[awe-inspiring music playing]

It opened in 1925 to great fanfare.

[Meares] To mark the occasion,

the entire city turned out.

There were two whole weeks of parades

and 12,000 people were out on the streets.

[Meigs] This theater had seating for 4,500 people,

making it the biggest movie theater in the world

at the time it opened.

There were 131 full-time employees here.

[Meares] Not a single expense was spared.

The lobby, for example, was modeled

after the Palace of Versailles.

[Syfczak] So as you entered the Grand Lobby here,

immediately your eyeballs popped out at the opulence

of the theater.

[Meigs] The chandeliers alone cost 30,000 dollars,

back in 1925 when it opened.

That would be something like half a million today.

At one point, there was even a Rembrandt

hanging on one of the walls.

[Syfczak] The auditorium is so vast

that the screen was 60 by 30,

so it was IMAX before they even invented IMAX.

The building as a whole was designed to function

as a one-stop shop.

[Meigs] This was built

for an urban pedestrian, streetcar-riding population.

So they had amenities. They had a nursery.

You could drop your kids off and go see an afternoon matinee.

Can you imagine people doing that today?

[laughing] It's just inconceivable.

For decades, the Uptown Theatre thrived

and was at the heart of the local community.

[enigmatic music playing]

But the popularity of home television sets

in the 1950s was compounded by dramatic changes

to theater building.

The priority was now on quantity, not quality.

[Meigs] It was hard for them to compete

with a multiplex built out by the interstate somewhere

that might have eight or 12 screens.

This shift in moviegoing made these really lavish places

like the Uptown completely obsolete.

But one young entrepreneur saw an opportunity

in its fading grandeur...

and would breathe it new life.

Some of the biggest names in entertainment

have stood on that stage.

[awe-inspiring music playing]

In 1975, Jerry Mickelson,

the current owner and music promoter,

discovered Chicago's Uptown Movie Theatre.

Though largely unused, its original grandeur

still shone through.

You walk into this place,

you can't help but fall in love with it.

The lobby is spectacular.

I got married in the lobby.

Jerry was searching for a theater

that could host top bands and rock concerts

without the restrictions he encountered

in the center of Chicago.

[Mickelson] Originally, 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.

[Meigs] Chicago 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.

[Mickelson] When Bob Marley came into a downtown theater,

the people that owned the theater went nuts

because as soon as he walked in, there's smoke and ganja.

We got hassled all day long. He got hassled.

[Gutierrez-Romine] But 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.

Free of 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.

On October 31st, 1975,

we presented our first concert here

with Fee Waybill and The Tubes.

[Meigs] And it was perfect for a rock and roll band.

You would have the green room in back.

You'd have space for the band and the various hangers-on.

[Mickelson] The band certainly wanted to play here

because there weren't restrictions that stopped them

from really putting on their very best show,

and the fans loved coming here

just to take in the beauty of the Theatre,

but also the fact that they were really so close to the stage,

no matter where you are.

The sight lines, you know,

sitting anywhere in this theater is really spectacular.

The acoustics are perfect.

[drums playing]

[Meigs] So the Uptown Theatre became

one of the go-to destinations

for the top bands of the day.

[Meares] There'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.

[Mickelson] Seeing Springsteen was always great here.

The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley, Frank Zappa.

I mean, all the shows that played here

were top-notch performers on their way up.

But the owners weren't living up to their end of the bargain.

[Gutierrez-Romine] They extracted every penny that they could,

but they never reinvested it back into the Theatre,

and for a place like Uptown,

that really was its death sentence.

[Mickelson] December 19th, 1981,

boy, I had to buy the oil to heat the theatre

'cause the owners couldn't afford to do it.

And the bathrooms were barely functioning

on the day of the show, and they decided to close it.

[Meigs] The Theatre changed hands again,

and the next owner really was just buying it

as a salvage opportunity.

They stripped out the plumbing and the fixtures,

and they sold everything off that they could.

In the mid-1990s,

David and a friend got involved in trying to save the building

from its slumlord owners.

[Syfczak] Unfortunately, they failed

and neglected to heat the building.

Where all these drain lines transitioned through the roof,

they froze, they burst.

Consequently, you had all that water

cascading through the building.

That was kind of heartbreaking

to see the condition the building was in.

This lobby was full of nothing but junk.

[sad music playing]

While David managed to keep the building alive,

an old face eventually returned with a plan to restore it

to its former glory.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Mickelson] I couldn't afford to buy it in 1981.

It wasn't until 2008

that I finally put all the pieces together

to make this work and immediately started

to put money into it to preserve it.

[enigmatic music playing]

The three original chandeliers were salvaged

and are being kept in storage.

By court order, they'll be refitted

when the theatre's restoration work

is 85% complete.

With plans to bring rock bands back to its stage,

David is waiting with bated breath

for opening night.

[Syfczak] I've been here since 1996

trying to save this building and working on keeping it alive

and maintaining it.

Hopefully I'm in the front row and I'm gonna rent a tuxedo

and I'm gonna pop a bottle of champagne and...

hopefully we're gonna get there in my lifetime.

[hopeful music playing]

[mysterious music playing]

In the Malaysian state of Perak

sits a majestic ruin plagued by the ghosts of its past.

[mysterious music playing]

[birds chirping]

[Rose] This 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.

[Bell] At first glance, it feels like the kind of castle

you might expect to see in the Scottish Highlands.

So what's it doing here in Malaysia?

[Rose] It's a strange blend of architecture.

You have Scottish and Moorish and Italian influences.

[Bell] Some areas seem to be in pretty good condition,

especially from the outside,

but then there are other parts

that look like they've been completely destroyed.

One thing we can say for certain

is this doesn't look like a stronghold built for defense.

The inside, although bare,

feels like it could've been someone's home.

This site holds a tale of one man's ambition,

which rode a wave of colonial expansion.

[Dr. Loh] He arrived with a humble dream

which could only be realized

because of the might of the British Empire.

[Bell] It's a story that changed the course of history,

and it begins with a theft.

[mysterious music playing]

In the jungles of Malaysia,

legend has it that this place is haunted.

Local resident Hakim is a believer.

[Muhaimin speaking in Malay]

[translator] When I first came here,

I felt that there was something here,

something that was watching me from afar.

I felt eyes on me.

[Hakim speaking in Malay]

[mysterious music playing]

The ghost stories that surround this building

are born out of its turbulent past.

[Bell] There's a good reason this grand residence

looks like it could be a Scottish castle,

and that's because Scotland is where its story begins,

with a man named William Smith.

[piobaireachd music playing]

William Kellie Smith was born in 1870

to relative poverty.

At the age of 20, he decided to seek his fortune

on the other side of the world,

in the British colony of Malaya,

today known as Malaysia.

[Rose] This was an era when Europe was claiming

overseas properties for their own, and they did it

with little regard to the native people.

[Dr. Loh] By the time William Smith

arrived in the colony

it was well established and right foot exploitation.

Smith embarked on survey work as a civil engineer

for a massive road building program.

With little competition, he quickly earned enough money

to buy a plot of land.

[Rose] And Smith purchased a thousand acres of land

where the house sits today,

but he didn't yet have the funds to build it.

All he had for years was a small wooden bungalow.

[Bell] He tried his luck at a few other businesses,

which all failed.

But with his next venture, marriage,

it hit the jackpot.

In 1903, he met 25-year-old Agnes,

a wealthy heiress to a Liverpool cotton merchant family.

After a whirlwind romance, they married,

and Smith came into 300,000 dollars

of Agnes's inheritance money.

This was a vast fortune,

the equivalent to around 10 million dollars today.

[Hakim speaking in Malay]

[translator] Based on what I understand about Mr. William,

he was very protective of his family.

Also, he would do anything

for the comfort of his wife and children.

[Hakim speaking in Malay]

Agnes hates the wooden bungalows,

so William starts work on a brick house.

It was complete by 1910 and was the beginning

of what would become Kellie's Castle.

[enigmatic music fading]

Smith continued to frivolously invest

his wife's inheritance

into his many failing businesses.

Among them a coffee plantation, sawmill, and dredging company.

But with one venture, he would strike it lucky.

[triumphant music playing]

[Bell] Smith 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.

What's fascinating about rubber,

and you might not think there's much,

is how rubber trees got to Malaya

in the first place.

It's a story that began with a theft.

[Dr. Loh] Rubber trees are native to the Amazon,

and they didn't grow anywhere else.

Brazil, for many years, had a complete world monopoly.

[Bell] The British weren't happy about this,

and they started to try and smuggle seeds

out of the country.

But every attempt failed,

as the seeds turned rancid before they got back to England.

But in 1876, a man named Henry Wickham

successfully transported 70,000 seeds back to London

using banana skins.

[Bell] Once there,

the botanists successfully germinated the seeds,

which were then sent out to the colonies

that had the right climate for them to thrive.

Malaya was by far the most productive.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Rose] This, coupled with the huge demand

from the US automobile industry in the 1900s,

created a massive boom in the rubber trade.

Rubber was suddenly like gold,

and money from Smith's plantation

was pouring in.

He began expanding his brick house

into the home he'd always dreamed of.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Bell] Work started in 1915,

and William was desperate to make a statement to show

that he was part of the colonial elite in Malaya.

And in the Victorian era, to do that,

you needed a castle estate,

and William wanted his to be the biggest.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Dr. Loh] Kellie's Castle was designed to incorporate Scottish,

Moorish and Indian architectural elements,

features which you can still see today.

Ornate garages were packed full of the latest motor cars.

Elaborate dining rooms welcomed guests

and hosted lavish dinner parties,

all maintained by an army of servants.

[Rose] The 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.

[Hakim speaking in Malay]

[translator] So at the time,

to build such a mansion in Malaya

was a grand and novel thing.

It became such a marvel to people around here.

It invoked that feeling of wow.

[Hakim speaking in Malay]

[enigmatic music playing]

More than 70 craftsmen from India were brought over

to work on the castle.

But this workforce

would soon be decimated by a global pandemic,

which would rip through the region.

[music fading]

In 1915, William Kellie Smith

began work on his dream castle in Malaysia

then the British colony of Malaya.

Construction was brought to a halt

during World War I.

And just as the conflict ended in 1918, tragedy struck.

[Rose] In November, a Spanish flu epidemic

passed through Malaya, killing 35,000 people,

many of them Williams' Indian workers.

Construction eventually got underway again,

but Smith wouldn't live to see his castle completed.

[Dr. Loh] He went to Europe to visit his wife Agnes

and their son Anthony,

who was attending boarding school there.

[Bell] As part of the trip, William went to Lisbon

with the intention of picking up his new elevator.

But while he was there, he caught pneumonia

and died at the age of 56.

[Rose] Agnes was said to be so heartbroken

that she never returned to Malaya.

She sold the estate,

and Kellie's Castle was never completed,

and it didn't take long for the jungle

to take hold once again.

[sad music playing]

[enigmatic music playing]

In 2000, the Malaysian government

restored the dilapidated old estate

with the hopes that it would draw in tourists,

and it does.

[Dr. Loh] But one of its main draws appears to be

the many ghost stories that surround this place.

Many visitors claim to feel a strange presence here.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Bell] Some say it's the Indian workers that died

because of the Spanish flu.

Others think it's the restless spirit

of William Kellie Smith

prowling the floors of his unfinished mansion.

Perhaps he just doesn't want strangers walking around

in his home.

[enigmatic music playing]

[mysterious music playing]

On the waters of San Francisco Bay

is a facility that from great tragedy

became the toast of a nation.

[mysterious music playing]

[Rose] So we're on this peninsula jutting out into the bay

with rolling tree-covered hills sloping down to the water.

[Pedrick] You see these sprawling remains,

but it's hard to get a sense of what their purpose

might've been.

And there's this vast red brick building

with towers and crenellations. It's like a castle.

This doesn't feel like somewhere

that was actually used for fortifications.

The sheer size of the site suggests that whatever happened

took place on a super-sized scale.

[Zarsadiaz] There are these vast rooms with rows and rows of columns

stretching out into the distance.

Other areas are clearly being used for storage.

There's old cars and furniture and boxes on shelves.

Just when you think that this was a civilian facility,

you start to see military rations and stretchers.

This complex was the brainchild of a man

who wanted to revolutionize an industry at a time

when San Francisco was reduced to smoking rubble.

It was a massive investment, a technical feat, really.

[Rose] But all of his efforts would be undone

by a radical national reform.

Overnight, he goes from entrepreneur to criminal.

[enigmatic music playing]

Frances Dinkelspiel is an author and journalist

who has written extensively

about the industry that made all this possible.

[Dinkelspiel] I was working on a story for "The New York Times."

There was a controversy about the space

and how it would be used,

and I was absolutely flabbergasted when I arrived.

It looked like an old medieval castle.

This majestic structure has less to do with royalty

and more to do with a national indulgence.

[Pedrick] In the 1890s,

the California wine industry was a mess.

Prices had been driven so low that winemakers and growers

were barely breaking even.

People sort of thought of California wines as cheap,

not that reliable, kind of tasted funky at times.

One man would start a movement

to transform California's dwindling wine industry

and its reputation.

[Rose] It was led by a rather unlikely figure,

an accountant from England,

who didn't seem to know anything about wine.

His name was Percy Morgan.

[Zarsadiaz] What he lacked in wine knowledge,

he made up for it in business smarts.

At the time, San Francisco

was the beating heart of the industry

due to its cool climate.

Grapes from across the state were crushed

and sent to wine houses in the city,

where they would be stored in large barrels to age.

And these wine houses were all in fierce competition.

[Dinkelspiel] Percy Morgan came up with an idea

to create sort of a mega corporation,

and so in 1894, he brought together

seven wine houses in San Francisco,

and they created the California Wine Association.

Also known as the CWA, they now had

almost total control of the state's industry.

But an epic disaster threatened to derail their progress.

April 18th, 1906...

a massive 7.9 magnitude earthquake

hit San Francisco.

While the quake lasts less than a minute,

it ignites several fires across the city,

which burn for three days.

More than 3,000 people died

and 80% of the city is destroyed.

Among the rubble are a number of vital buildings owned

by the California Wine Association.

Out of nearly 30, only three

of the city's commercial wine establishments survive.

[Pedrick] Around 10 million gallons of their wine

was said to've been destroyed in the earthquake

and the fires that followed.

[Rose] It looks as if the state's wine industry

has been destroyed beyond all repair.

But out of the ashes of this tragedy,

Percy Morgan sees another opportunity.

[Dinkelspiel] Percy Morgan said,

"I'm not rebuilding all these plants.

I wanna create one master winemaking facility."

[Rose] He believed that if the CWA could rebuild

in one big complex, it would be more efficient,

and they could dominate the industry.

[Dinkelspiel] And so the CWA

purchased 46 acres in Point Molate

across the bay in San Francisco to construct Winehaven.

Built in 1907, one year after the fire,

Winehaven was a state-of-the-art facility.

[Dinkelspiel] You can't help but be impressed at this building.

It cost about 6 million dollars to construct.

It was the largest winery in the world.

Could store 10 million gallons of wine.

Its enormous size was complemented

by its location, strategically chosen

for maximum impact.

[enigmatic music playing]

Morgan had been really smart

in where he chose to build Winehaven.

[Rose] When the Panama Canal opened in 1914,

the shipping lanes led right past Winehaven,

and suddenly, almost the entire world

is within reach of the CWA.

[Dinkelspiel] Winehaven was really a city-state.

Not only were, you know, grapes brought here,

crushed here, stored here, Winehaven made its own casks,

importing wood from Louisiana, for example.

It had its own bottling plant.

A workforce of skilled laborers

hailing from Italy and beyond

swelled to 400 people during the harvest.

The company made sure there was everything for staff,

including housing, a post office, and a school.

[enigmatic music playing]

[Pedrick] But there was a wave of change coming,

one that would transform the United States

and threaten Winehaven's very existence.

[hammers pounding]

Constructed in 1907,

Winehaven was the biggest winery

in the world.

But little more than a decade later,

radical reform brought it to its knees.

At the stroke of midnight on January 17, 1920,

the country goes dry

when Prohibition is enforced across the nation.

This is the death knell for Winehaven.

The workers at Winehaven held a last lunch

probably here on the loading dock.

They had been here for more than a decade,

producing some of the greatest wine

in the world, and all of a sudden,

in the United States, wine was mostly prohibited.

That was the end of production of wine in Winehaven.

[Zarsadiaz] Percy Morgan,

the man who did everything to make

the California Wine Association successful...

was inconsolable.

[Dinkelspiel] Here he was, an upstanding citizen,

one of the most respected business people in California,

and all of a sudden, a law declared

that he was morally corrupt.

[Pedrick] On the morning of April 16, 1920,

still in his pajamas,

Morgan walked into the library of his home and shot himself.

[Rose] After Winehaven was shut down,

its warehouses were still full of wine

that they hadn't been able to sell.

[Dinkelspiel] So, stories are

that they dumped a lot of this wine

right here into the bay, and that days afterwards,

it was really easy to catch fish,

who were so drunken from the wine

that they just sort of laid there.

[Rose] The California Wine Association

sells off its assets to avoid bankruptcy,

and this giant facility is mothballed.

Despite Prohibition ending in 1933,

it was only when the nation was at war

that the building was utilized once more.

[somber music playing]

After the surprise Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor,

the United States is drawn into World War II,

and Winehaven is given a new lease on life.

[Dinkelspiel] The U.S. Navy bought the property,

and they turned it into a fuel storage facility

for the Pacific Fleet.

When the war ends,

the Navy continues to operate the site,

adapting the cellars against a new national threat

during the height of the Cold War.

[Dinkelspiel] In the bowels of this property,

the Navy set up a bomb shelter,

the remnants of which you can still see today.

They have drinking water, they have cots,

they have commodes.

They have all the things you might need

if you had to hide out from radiation

for an extended period of time.

Finally, in 1995, the site was decommissioned.

[enigmatic music playing]

After the Navy withdrew from Winehaven,

it became the property of the city of Richmond.

[Pedrick] There've been various proposals

of things to do with the site, aaah --

At one point, there was an idea

of turning it into a casino complex,

but nothing ever really panned out.

And now the question remains,

will Winehaven ever return to its roots?

[Dinkelspiel] In the last five to ten years,

there was a winemaker who was making wine

at Winehaven, which was really exciting,

but nowadays it's mostly used as a storage facility.

[Pedrick] But if you look closely,

you can see that some of these massive warehouses

are being used to store wine once again.

[enigmatic music playing]