Off Limits (2011) s01e01 Episode Script
Los Angeles
Well there's about a foot of pure muck.
Man, wow.
Welcome to L.
A.
Where anything can happen.
This is where a genius brought water to the city If you fall down there, you fall about 100 feet down and drown.
And caused a catastrophe.
All of this was a 190-foot dam Where an oil rig can be your next-door neighbor on one side.
Not looking down.
And on the other side, a dream house for Nazis.
It's eerie, and imagine Nazis here in L.
A.
Buckle up and leave your star maps at home.
This is L.
A.
, Off Limits.
"In every city, every town, are places sealed off from the rest of the world, hiding their amazing stories, behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm Don Wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
Off Limits Season 01 Episode 01 One, two, three.
I've got it.
- Well, we just don't want anyone to see us, so, yeah, we've just got to hurry.
- Yeah, right.
It's pretty funny.
It's not exactly terrorism we're committing here.
We just want to go for a paddle on the river, but in L.
A.
, that's an illegal activity.
- All right, Don, let's hurry.
- Okay, okay.
Let's see here.
I'm about to kayak down the L.
A.
river.
We're risking fines and even jail time, but it's worth it.
It might look like a sorry drainage ditch, but it's actually a real river that's been flowing for ages.
Every town needs a water source, and a couple of hundred years ago, this was it.
It's the reason L.
A.
is here at all.
Los Angeles, the beaches of Malibu, Hollywood boulevard It's a sunny, laid-back paradisefor almost 10 million people, on the surface.
The real story of L.
A.
is in the last places you'd think to look, like here the L.
A.
river.
The river is off-limits to the public, and we're right by a major freeway, so we need to be careful we're not seen.
- All right, let me put this up there first.
- Let's see here.
My guide is biologist Heather Wylie.
She used to work for the army corps of engineers, and she knows the secrets of the river like the back of her hand.
Let's get going, Don.
We're gonna hurry downstream, where there's less chance of being seen.
I'm off.
- This is fun.
- Yeah, baby, this is nice.
- Wow, look at the birds.
- Yeah, there's a lot of waterfowl in here.
20 Miles from the head of the river, we pushed off near Warner Brothers studios.
We're heading downtown, where the river used to water orange groves.
But if we wanted to, we could take it all the way to the pacific ocean, something Heather knows well.
So tell me something you basically went for a boat rideand got fired, yeah? Well, um, I they tried to suspend me.
In 2008, heather was working for the army corps of engineers when she went public with the fact that the corps was planning to redesignate the river as a drainage ditch.
It would have made it really difficultto keep clean water protections on the creeks and wetlands that drain into this river, and it would have set a really bad precedencefor rivers all around the country.
- They had claimed that you could not boat in here.
- Right.
Oddly enough, the distinction between a river and a drainage ditch was whether or not you could boat in it.
The army corps said you couldn't.
Heather proved you could.
When the army corps found out, they tried to suspend her, sparking a series of legal battles.
And actually, we drew so much public outcry, and the E.
P.
A.
Stepped in and said that this is, in fact, a navigable waterway.
What we're doing right now proves this is a river.
And so, legally, it should be protected.
So is this clean water, relatively speaking? - Uh, I definitely would not drink it - Yeah, okay.
But it's fine for boating in.
- You can really get cooking on this thing.
- Right.
You okay back there? I'm a little heavier than you.
I must lipped it there.
- You're doing a good job with paddling.
- Oh, thanks a lot.
So how close is this part of the river to what it originally was? Well, this is as close as you're gonna get.
- This river used to support steelhead trout, grizzly bears, it was a dense, lush forest.
- Right.
Heather explains to me that the river was the life blood of young L.
A.
It's why the Spanish founded a pueblo here in 1781, and for ages, it has watered the valley and L.
A.
basin.
Look at that.
We're going straight into downtown L.
A.
Now you have an alternate route downtown.
So far, on our river tour, we've been surrounded by trees, grass, and wildlife.
It's been easy to forget that the riveris almost entirely lined with concrete.
But as we hit downtown, that reality couldn't be more obvious.
So why is it like this? The first answer is massive flooding.
You may not realize it, but the L.
A.
river gets 40 inches of rain a year, as much as the Mississippi, and floods have killed more people in L.
A.
county than earthquakes.
When L.
A.
's population was exploding in the 20th century, modern Los Angeles set up shop right in the flood plain, ignoring the ancient wisdom of native Americans, who chose to live on higher ground.
The great flood of 1938 claimed over 100 lives and left thousands homeless.
But plenty of other cities deal with floods, so why did L.
A.
do the most drastic thing imaginableand entomb the river in concrete? The demand was a public demand, am I wrong? I mean, these floods were bad.
I mean, people died, huge amounts of property damage.
What they really wanted to do was to maximize the amount of development that could happen, so what they wanted to do was buildright up to the edges of the river.
- It was really to facilitate the massive developmentof the Los Angeles basin.
- Right.
By the 1920s, L.
A.
's first real estate moguls, men like Harry Chandler and Moses sherman, had made a fortune buying up most of the San Fernando valley.
Then investors turned their sights on new territory the land around the river.
They pressured the U.
S.
government into giving the river a makeover.
The army corps went to work designing, then building the longest concrete-lined river in the world.
It took 30 years, 3.
5 million barrels of concrete, and over $100 million to channelize the riverand its tributaries.
It's much wider and deeper than the original river.
This system oh, hello.
Uh-oh, we've got a visitor here.
Ironically, we're talking about raging flood waters.
So the cops have told us we got to get out of here.
Um, they're kind enough to let us stay a few minutes.
They explained that it's very, very dangerous down here, and a couple guys were swept away just last week.
So let's get out of here.
The open channel we're leaving is actually only one small part of a vast system of "tributaries" that run beneath all of L.
A.
, and luckily, heather knows how to get me inside.
- So we're just gonna go through this fence right here.
- All right.
We need to move quickly, or risk another run in with the authorities.
- Oh, man, try not to break my fingers.
- All right.
Okay, Don, so stay close to me.
I love this woman.
Coming down.
This is great.
All right.
Right.
So now we are underneath the city.
This is just gigantic.
It really is gigantic, and it will get bigger than this as well.
There's thousands of miles of these storm drains - Really? - Underneath the city.
So everything that flows through here basically pours eventually into the L.
A.
river channel - Right.
- And straight out to the ocean.
No matter where people are in this city, watering their lawns in Compton or washing their car in Beverly Hills, they are connected to this riverby a network of tunnels underneath them.
It's a network close to 5,000 miles long.
That's practically all the way to New York and back.
And even on a dry day, like today, it's carrying 100 million gallons of water into the open channel and straight out to sea.
I mean, we're looking at a tiny little trickle here of regular water from regular life, but this is designed for flash flood conditions, in which case, I would be swept out to sea.
All this concrete is here to make the water flow quickly, with as little friction as possible, but maybe this isn't the best solution for a city where drought is the norm.
Rather than innovate and figure out how to integrate the whole thing, - they just made a lot more concreteto get rid of the water faster and easier.
- Right.
We're actually trying to go back and fix this.
What they can do is they can actually collect the water in these cisterns along side streets And actually at people's houses that you can use to water your garden.
Heather is part of a growing movement to return the river and its watershed into something more like its natural form.
It would protect against flash floods, look good, and provide the thirsty city with extra fresh water.
Oh, my God, there you go.
That's the river.
This is L.
A.
, so I guess anything is possible.
As the sun goes down, I have only a few minutes to enjoy the weirdest and most unexpected river trip I've ever taken.
But I get it, why Heather, and activists like her, want to save it.
We've passed neighborhoods that used to be orange groves and are now the very definition of urban blight.
With a little bit of work, who knows what they could be again? Our cameras get the first glimpse inside the tunnel that keeps L.
A.
alive.
- If it stopped? - L.
A.
goes dry.
There's not enough water.
And a hidden Nazi compound in the hills near Malibu.
This place is an outrageous piece of wreckage.
when Los Angeles was born, it got its water from the L.
A.
river, but as the city grew up, the river wasn't enough.
So how did L.
A.
's founders provide water for the millions who came here? They stole it.
I'm driving north through the mojave desert to find out how the city's masterminds channeled water from hundreds of Miles away and defied a desert to build a city.
Downtown L.
A.
is about 100 miles in that direction, and right now this big black pipe in this cany on here is full of water on its way to Los Angeles, right up that Mountain.
So what makes the impossible possible? That's a question you really can't stop asking about Los Angeles, and the answer usually involves genius engineering and huge amounts ambition, mixed with plenty of controversy and scandal, just like that pipe the L.
A.
aqueduct.
If you've seen the movie "Chinatown,"this story might sound familiar, because the L.
A.
noir classicwas based on a scandalous and true tale.
- How you doing? - Hey, guys.
I'm meeting up with Fred Barker and Rick Mayfield who work for the department of water and power.
They're giving me special access to the aqueduct.
In fact, my crew will be the first ever to film inside of it.
The aqueduct spans a desert and a mountain range, with 233 miles of channels, tunnels, and pipes, all to bring water to L.
A.
In 1908, it must have been it was a miracle.
It was.
A lot of people that lived in L.
A.
, they thought it was a fool's errand to try to build such a long aqueduct across the desert.
You have mountains.
You have valleys.
You have canyons.
You can imagine in 1908 what it was like to be out herebuilding this thing very, very remote, very dangerous, very rocky.
Man.
This is the aqueduct right here.
We're looking at this in a canyon.
How is it that the water even gets up this hill? I mean, is there a pump down there? - No.
The north end of this pipe is about 10 feet higher than where we are at the south end - Oh, I see.
So that 10 feet of elevation difference pushes the water down and up the other side.
And this is the case for the whole of the aqueduct, yeah? The whole aqueduct works the same way.
On its way to Los Angeles, it drops over 2,500 feet, and the water moves solely by gravity.
- And we're going inside this thing? - And we're gonna go inside.
I can't imagine how miners from a century ago managed to build a structure that has been able to keep up with L.
A.
's constantly growing population.
In 100 years, no one has ever filmed what this looks like on the inside.
No one's ever gone down there with a camera, so there's a first time for everything, huh? L.
A.
aqueduct.
- Hey, guys.
- Hey.
- Your feet wet? - I did.
This is cool.
- So this is the actual I mean, we're looking at a 100-year-old tunnel here.
- 100-year-old stuff.
Okay, so now we don't go down that way? No.
We go down that way, and we won't be able to get back.
It'll be a slippery slope.
- So that's the actual pipe coming up the hill? - The pipe coming up that we were looking at.
- So you fall down there, you fall about 100 feet down and drown.
Nice.
- Yeah, and drown.
This aqueduct carries almost 200 million gallons of water every day to L.
A.
but every once in awhile, parts are drained for critical maintenance, giving us a rare chance to look inside.
Let's take a ride.
We're about 100 miles south of the Owens river source, heading right through a mountainin a 2 1/2-mile stretch of tunnel.
So how much of this is the original tunnel? Pretty much 99.
9% is original.
Okay, so something this is all different here.
So this is solid granite above our heads? Right, right.
This is the Mountain.
- In this section of the tunnel, the raw rock ceiling, there's no need for the top - Yep.
But what happens is the concrete forms like a shelf and some of the workers left some of their debris behind when they were constructing the tunnel.
Nails, tobacco tins, and old toolsare left undisturbed, as a tribute the the men who risked their lives 100 years ago.
Look up here.
This is the Mountain itself, granite, which has been blasted out.
Indeed, you can even see here, here's a drill hole, which has been packed with dynamite.
They blow out the rock, ship that out, layer the space with concrete to the precise dimensions they need, and then hand-line it with this plaster.
This surface I'm touching here, 100 years old, right? This thing just keeps on working a century later.
It was an engineering marvel and the vision of a man named William Mulholland.
Mulholland was an Irish immigrant, and he goes back to the beginnings of Los Angeles.
Yeah, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1877 at the age of 21.
So he was a very young man, and he spent the rest of his life in Los Angeles, bringing water to the city.
So he starts as a ditch digger, basically.
He dug the ditches, kept the dead animals out, and pulled the weeds out.
He slowly moves his way up the ladder.
That's right, he worked his way up to head of the entire department of water and power.
Mulholland saw the writing on the wall L.
A.
was growing, and it needed a new source of water.
His friend, former mayor FredEaton, suggested the Owens river valley, a couple of hundred miles north of L.
A.
, where he had been quietly buying up property from local farmers.
But taking water from the valley community would come back to haunt them.
Construction involved 100,000 workers tunneling close to 20 feet a dayover four and a half years.
The truly startling fact is that this is not just history we're talking about.
- This is in use today.
- That's right.
This is an active asset of the city.
It carries water to the city year in and year out and has since 1913.
And if it stopped, L.
A.
goes dry? L.
A.
goes dry.
There's not enough water.
Today, keeping the water flowingstill takes a massive effort.
We've made it 2 miles in, and now I get to see how it's done.
To rip through the crumbling concrete, the D.
W.
P.
has some heavy machinery with a nasty bite.
How you doing? Listen to that thing, huh? It's like the beast is right back here.
L.
A.
gets its water, and all hell breaks loose.
The local people, some of them, began to attack the aqueduct.
Downtown L.
A.
is 100 miles south, and we're deep in the heart of this aqueduct, where the D.
W.
P.
has a big job keeping the water flowing to Los Angeles.
So that's the continuous mine right there.
It's basically coal mining equipment that's been redesigned, adapted, for this use.
The constant moisture has rotted the concrete ceiling, so they're grinding it down to reline it.
I mean, you can imagine the guys in 1908 would have killed to have something like this, I mean, equipment like this to do the job they did by handand with dynamite.
When this aqueduct was first built, would this have you'd basically be doing this with dynamite and stuff, yeah? Can you imagine what these guys would have thought of your job? That's when men were men.
That's when men were men.
Exactly.
I don't know, you look like a man to me.
Okay, so they're stopped down right now.
Every once in awhile, this thing, of course, tangles up on stuff around it.
Look, this is a piece of rebarthey're gonna have to literally cut out of here.
It gives you a chance to take a look at this thing up close.
Look, carbide teeth, hardened steel.
They used to use inverted jackhammers, right, stopers, they were called, to actually knock downbig pieces of only the worst decayed ceiling.
But now they can basically do upwards of 5 to 1,000 feet with this thing just roaring through the tunnel.
100 years ago, the men who built the aqueduct didn't just have to deal with backbreaking work.
They had a violent uprising on their hands.
Once the aqueduct was turned on, the Owens river valley farmland was quickly drained dry, and the people who relied on it weren't too happy.
The local people, some of them, began to attack the aqueduct.
- I mean, this is known as the water wars of California.
- California water war, yes.
Valley farmers banded togetherto stop the water flowing to L.
A.
There was something of a guerilla warfare going on.
They were basically dynamiting parts of the aqueductin order to prevent the flow of the water.
Exactly.
They were trying to stop L.
A.
from actually getting the water.
And how long did this go on? From 1924 to about 1928.
Ultimately, Mulholland prevailed.
In fact, today, the city still imports 90% of its waterfrom the farthest reaches of California.
- So end of the line here, huh? - End of the line.
We've made it 2 1/2 Miles through a Mountain, and we're coming out the other side.
Daylight.
- So, uh, how do we get out? - Right up here.
Well, there must be a ladder around here somewhere.
But Mulholland's stunning achievement would be followedby one of the worst disasters in California history.
I'm driving west of the aqueduct to find a place most people don't even know exists.
You see, for Mulholland, the aqueduct wasn't enough.
In 1926, he completed his final project, the St.
Francis dam, at the end of this unmarked road.
Let's see up here.
Yeah, you can see some piping.
Ooh, there it is.
That is the concrete, a crumbled rubble, of what was the St.
Francis dam.
The dam held back enough water to supply all of L.
A.
for an entire year.
Experts warned the site was geologically unstable, but Mulholland ignored them.
Check it out.
Look at that.
I mean, all of this is basically the rubble, the remains, of what was a 190-foot-high dam.
One of the, you know, proud achievements of the early L.
A.
water days.
On march 12,1928,the dam gave way, Saint Francis dam Unleashing a 78-foot wave on a 65-mile rampage to the ocean.
Pacific Ocean Los Angeles it destroyed everything in its path.
Hundreds and hundreds of peopleperished in this night.
They never declare exactly how many people died.
The estimates run from 360 to upwards of 800 people.
There were bodies found as far South as Mexico washed out to sea, drifted down with the current.
I mean, this was a huge, huge, huge tragedy.
And it ended Mulholland's career.
He took full responsibility.
And never returned to public life.
The cost of building a city on the edge of a desert was higher than anyone imagined.
Whoo, that thing's tall.
A bird's-eye view of the real industrythat keeps L.
A.
pumping.
There was a reason men like Mulholland spent millions in public funds to bring water to Los Angeles and grow a city in the desert, Hollywood bl but it wasn't the movie industry or the nice weather that originally lured people to L.
A.
It was oil.
Los Angeles is the largest urban oil field in the world, and it's one of the only places on earth where active oil Wells are also valuable residential real estate.
So this is, quite honestly, one of the most unusual neighborhoodsi've ever seen in my life very, very exclusive properties sitting amidst these working oil pump units.
They had to totally reengineer this entire hill, right? 'Cause imagine the pipelines.
Take a look at that.
I mean, not bad smooth, quiet.
Not a bad neighbor, right? The L.
A.
basin has almost 30,000 active rigs.
Back in the 1920s, california was the largest producer of oilin the world, Pacific ocean Hollywood downtown and you could see the rigs everywhere the 20th century fox lot, the miracle mile, the future site of dodger stadium.
Today, in places like Beverly Hills, the rigs are camouflaged, but south of downtown, you can't miss the fact that L.
A.
is built on an oil field.
If I was living next to an oil pump, I'd want to know exactly what was going on there, but the oil industry is highly secretive and extremely restrictive.
To get access, you need to know someone on the inside.
How you doing, robert? - How are you, sir? - Good, how are you? - An oil man in a prius? - Yes, of course.
- Saving saving the world.
- Modern thinker.
Robert Porter is a bona fide oil man.
His family has been drilling for over a generation.
Well, my dad was a driller.
20th Century Fox had 3 drill sites.
I used to go there and play on the sets.
So I'm looking at neighborhoods and businesses that have literally pumping derricks right in their parking lots and their backyards all over here.
- I think there's maybe 1,500-2,000.
- No way.
Yeah, and those units are called pumping units.
The Derrick is actually the piece of equipment that drills the well.
Yeah, I was gonna say that, actually.
Luckily, Robert's getting me access to a live drill platform right in the middle of signal hill, one of the L.
A.
basin's most densely populated areas.
- Hey, Kevin.
- Hey, guys.
- How you doing? I'm Don.
- Good.
Hey, Don.
So what's actually happening here? It's a long-term idle well.
Kevin laney director of rig operations signal hill petroleum we're gonna reactivate it and put it on production.
How long ago was this well drilled? This well, I believe, was drilled in the '40s.
- In the '40s? - Yeah, a lot of our Wells were drilled '20s, '30s, and '40s.
- That's amazing.
- Yeah.
So there's that much oil undergroundthat for 50 years absolutely, yeah.
There's still a lot of oil left.
One of the world's largest oil fields here in signal hill.
- Amazing.
- It was the Saudi Arabia of the '30s.
No kidding.
Before there were suburbs in Southern California, there were derricks so many that signal hill earned the name porcupine hill.
Drilling for oil in the early days meant a geyser of crudefilling an open pit and being carted off from there, but as more and more people came to chase the oil, those pits were paved over for premium real estate.
The city grew up right on top of the oil field and production never stopped.
And today, drilling for oilis still a dangerous line of work.
Just, uh, don't want to get too close to any moving parts.
- Yeah.
- But we're fine.
So this pipe is going down this pipe has a cutter attached to it 5,000 feet in the ground.
So this is a hollow pipe that basically goes down 5,000 feet? Yeah, that's correct.
So I can drop something I'm not gonna do it, but I can drop something down there, it'd go down? Yeah, you'd be in big trouble.
- I would not do that.
- Yeah, yeah.
Roughnecks here have been doing the same job for almost 100 years, while the city around them keeps growing.
If they were in Texas or Saudi Arabia, they'd be out in the middle of nowhere, so I want to climb to the top of this 55-foot derrick to see what a city on top of an oil field looks like.
Whoo, that thing's tall.
- Here's your safety right here.
- All right, okay.
Keep it on at all times.
Here goes.
- Just take your time.
- Yeah, thanks.
Wow, that's a long way up.
All right, so, uh, not looking down.
It is a long way up here.
You can feel this whole thing is rocking back and forth.
Wow, man, I mean, just one aspect of this incredibly dangerous, treacherous work being done, just to pull this oil out of the ground.
I mean, if you look around us, it's one of the busiest freeways in socal over there, long beach airport over there.
Just beyond that lot, suburbs.
I mean, we're in the middle of a place where people are busy living and doing their thing, and here we are drilling for oil.
It would be very interesting situation where you have oil being pumped out inside of an urban environment.
We've come a long way since the days of open pits and deafening machinery, but the end result is still the same.
- There it is black gold, baby.
- Here we go.
- No water.
- Look at that.
This is why people came to L.
A.
Oil and the money they could make from it.
With all the people moving here because of the boom, the oil industry had no choice but to adapt.
That's the L.
A.
way, though have your oil field and build on it, too.
And it was one man's wonderland on the west coast.
I'm hunting down what's left of a tycoon's wild vision for L.
A.
with the discovery ofoil, L.
A.
's population tripled, and all those people needed to be entertained.
In the entertainment capital of the world, before there were talkies, there was Venice Beach.
So this is Venice Beach kind of sexy, kind of seedy.
Long before this place was a beach side tourist trap/yuppie enclave, venice was basically a lot of low-priced, marshland real estate, that is, until a brilliant tobacco tycoon named Abbot Kinney came here and decided it should be something else altogether.
A glamorous re-creation of its Italian namesake, Venice.
15 miles west of downtown, Venice has always been geographically and culturally on the fringe.
Local expert Todd Von Hoffman is gonna show me what's left of Kinney's original dream.
- This all-evocative St.
Mark's place in venice.
- Exactly.
It looks Italian because it was supposed to.
Venice Venice, Italy, Venice, California.
Exactly.
He wanted to create one city entirely in his vision.
Kinney saw the marshlandas the perfect place to re-create venice's most famous feature, the canals, and he had plenty of money to throw down.
He had made an incredible fortune in the tobacco business with his brothers, and yeah, back in those pre-income tax days, you could do quite a lot.
Venice had a massive pleasure pier with carnival rides and games, but the main attraction was 16 miles of canals.
It was one man's wonderland on the west coast.
We're actually looking at Abbot Kinney's lagoon right here.
- Really? - Yeah.
So this traffic circle used to be water, basically? Exactly.
This grand avenue, is the original grand canal.
- No way.
- He first started digging that in August of 1904.
That is fascinating.
So we're basically sort of seeing the layout of the original old venice here.
Exactly.
This was sort of ground zero for the waterway system.
It took thousands of workers one year to transform the swamp into a paradise.
When they finished in 1905, most of venice was reachable by boat with canals refreshed by pipes that connected the ocean nearby.
So these canals have been paved over, but there are still canals here today? Yes.
We can actually see them, if we just go down this way.
Kinney's canals were so popular, that a private land-owning company capitalized on his vision, building these canals a year later.
This is all built just a couple of years after kinney created his canal system for venice.
This is gorgeous.
So basically, these canals connect like they did back in the day of Abbot Kinney.
They do.
This is really what Kinney was striving for.
This is the idyllic life-on-the-water existencethat he was thinking about.
Yeah.
In 1929, less than 10 years after Kinney died, his playground was already becoming pass by now talkies and gin joints were all the rage, and with more and more people coming to L.
A.
, Kinney's dream was paved over to make way for a new one a dream of speed, convenience, and freedom.
The car had arrived in Los Angeles.
So this is original, and it goes under what? Under a bridge there.
All right, I'm gonna take a look down there.
Do you want to come? Uh, no.
So down here is what looks like a storm drainage system that now goes under venice boulevard.
But in the day, the whole canal system kept on going for a number of miles, so I'm gonna take a look, and see if we can walk right back there.
See what's what.
So this is it.
This is the end of the system today.
Let's see what you can see through here.
I yeah, kind of deep water there.
I don't want to get my boots wet.
So All right.
lt's pretty ironic.
Abbott Kinney's 100-year-old canal system is intact.
His vision that way, but under here is the way to the other 16 miles of canals, now covered up by the modern city.
Let's take a look.
Whoa, it's deep.
Now there's about a foot of pure muck that my feet are going through, and then I can feel the concrete slabthat's been poured here.
Oh, man.
Sea water, right? So you've got barnacles.
And it stinks.
Yuck.
Okay, so that's that is really the end there.
Storm drain.
Moving on.
Now, as you can see, filled in, covered up with the muck from venice above, but the great ironyis that no matter how much coverage there's been, venice is still there.
It's still eclectic.
It's still a little weird.
It's still, you know, a carnival.
Oh, man, it is gooey.
It doesn't get much creepier than Nazis hiding out next door.
They wanted people to stay out.
The walls a foot thick.
Los angelesis an impossible place brought to life by visionaries like Abbot Kinney and Mulholland.
But a city where anything is possible also attracts a darker breed of dreamers.
The remote hills above the city offer the perfect kind of seclusion for twisted groups, like the manson family, to build their own warped utopias.
And in the 1930s, this is where a wealthy couple built a secret compound to pave the way for an America ruled by Nazis.
Randy.
While many of the details are unknown, local historian Randy young has pieced together an amazing story.
he's taking me into the hills north of Santa Monica to a secluded estate known as Murphy ranch.
This is way before world war II, so nazism is not necessarily viewed, at the time, as the great scourge of the earththat it eventually becomes.
It was not.
it was worried about, but it was not against the law.
It turns out there was good reason to worry.
In 1938, over 20,000 American fascists rallied in Madison Square Garden.
But here in L.
A.
, nazism took ona more secretive and paranoid form.
You can see that they have a bit of barbed wire going on here.
I mean, really, clearly, these people were concerned about invaders, you know, somebody coming in and finding them there.
They wanted people to stay out.
It still feels that way.
Wow, man, that's intense-looking.
Wow, I mean, this is a very, very fancy piece of wrought-iron work.
That was designed by Paul Williams, one of the finest architects in Los Angeles.
Paul Williams was a very famous African-American architect.
Correct.
They may have been Nazis, but they were Nazis with taste.
Of course they were.
I'm counting one, two, three, four there's eight locks on here.
- Yes.
- Eight padlocks on this, but somebody's done the job for us.
Absolutely.
Randy tells me the owners, Winona and Norman Stephens, broke ground in 1933.
Because they were so secretive, there are no known photos of them, but they did leave behind the blueprints for what appeared to be a grand estate.
But the evidence here shows they were planning more than just building a giant mansion in the hills.
There's a structure over here.
What is this? Um, this is the huge water tank.
- It is insanely big.
- Yep.
Damn.
How much water can this hold? 400,000 gallons.
And it was full? It was full, and, in fact, it had a roof over it.
So this is a dead give away.
I mean, nobody with one family living in the hills needs a water tank this big.
Correct.
So they were basically trying to createa closed system here, - a self-sustaining community- Correct.
And this was part of that.
They could close the gates, be behind the barbed wire, and they could be invisible for two years.
Adolf Hitler always felt that the United States governmentwould collapse and anarchy would break out.
This was to be a little model community where government could be offered.
The Stephens envisioned the ranch as a safe havenfrom the chaos in America, a place where they could eventually help Hitler restore order.
They were followers of the silver shirts 15,000 California fascists who believed in Hitler and the occult.
But here at Murphy ranch, the Stephens' main advisor was a mysterious man from Germany known only as herr Schmitt.
He brought a radio and code books, and so he was there to basically give espionage intelligence to Germany.
- He's a German spy.
- He was a German spy.
This was his secret base, just a few miles from Hollywood.
- Damn, what is this? - This is the power station.
It is cast concrete 1-foot thick.
Amazing.
A very substantial structure.
It seems like every graffiti artist in socal has been here, but they probably have no ideatheir canvas was a Nazi strong hold.
There was a generator there and right there.
In fact, this thing looks like it was built to withst and a direct bomb hit.
Check this out.
Look at the catwalk.
Okay, this was built, you know, 75 years ago, this was put together.
It's still showing very little sign of decay.
The walls, right, a foot thick.
I mean, it is downright eerie to stand in here and imagine business as usual, you know, for Nazis.
It is supposed to be that seed where American fascism would grow.
This is behind the power station here, and you can see where these are the fuel lines coming in and apparently ran straight up here to a fuel tank, a 20,000-gallon fuel tank.
Damn.
So they would have been able to be back here for upwards of a year or more without needing, obviously, fuel, or for that matter, water.
Ooh, this is nice.
To complete their Nazi utopia, the Stephens were planning to build a 22-bedroom mansion, but by 1941,their money was running low, and they were living here.
This was the original garage and the quarters for the chauffer.
I see the garage part there.
- Well, it has had better years.
- Yes.
It burned down in 1978, but this became, actually, the main household for the Stephens.
This is where they were gonna live temporarily until the big mansion was built - Right.
- Because it was the only structure, so this is where they would have their meetings.
What happened at those meetings? They could very well have been planning the logistics of the fuhrers' takeover of L.
A.
We'll never know, because the F.
B.
I.
raided the ranch in 1941.
The day after pearl harbor, December 8,1941,they shut this place down, and I know for a fact that the silver shirts stopped official operation December 8, 1941.
The F.
B.
I.
records are still sealed, so we may never know exactly what happened here.
This place is an outrageous piece of wreckage, but it was their outrageous vision, and L.
A.
is where they chose to make it happen.
You know, it's why anybody comes here, right? To reinvent yourself, where you can be anything and do anything well, almost.
L.
A.
it's always been fertile ground for dreamers.
Some build, some destroy, but they've all left their mark.
Who knows how the next generation of visionaries will once again transfrom the impossible city.
Man, wow.
Welcome to L.
A.
Where anything can happen.
This is where a genius brought water to the city If you fall down there, you fall about 100 feet down and drown.
And caused a catastrophe.
All of this was a 190-foot dam Where an oil rig can be your next-door neighbor on one side.
Not looking down.
And on the other side, a dream house for Nazis.
It's eerie, and imagine Nazis here in L.
A.
Buckle up and leave your star maps at home.
This is L.
A.
, Off Limits.
"In every city, every town, are places sealed off from the rest of the world, hiding their amazing stories, behind locked doors, inside barbed wire, where they say you cannot go.
I'm Don Wildman, and these are the places I live to explore, the ones they tell you are off limits.
Off Limits Season 01 Episode 01 One, two, three.
I've got it.
- Well, we just don't want anyone to see us, so, yeah, we've just got to hurry.
- Yeah, right.
It's pretty funny.
It's not exactly terrorism we're committing here.
We just want to go for a paddle on the river, but in L.
A.
, that's an illegal activity.
- All right, Don, let's hurry.
- Okay, okay.
Let's see here.
I'm about to kayak down the L.
A.
river.
We're risking fines and even jail time, but it's worth it.
It might look like a sorry drainage ditch, but it's actually a real river that's been flowing for ages.
Every town needs a water source, and a couple of hundred years ago, this was it.
It's the reason L.
A.
is here at all.
Los Angeles, the beaches of Malibu, Hollywood boulevard It's a sunny, laid-back paradisefor almost 10 million people, on the surface.
The real story of L.
A.
is in the last places you'd think to look, like here the L.
A.
river.
The river is off-limits to the public, and we're right by a major freeway, so we need to be careful we're not seen.
- All right, let me put this up there first.
- Let's see here.
My guide is biologist Heather Wylie.
She used to work for the army corps of engineers, and she knows the secrets of the river like the back of her hand.
Let's get going, Don.
We're gonna hurry downstream, where there's less chance of being seen.
I'm off.
- This is fun.
- Yeah, baby, this is nice.
- Wow, look at the birds.
- Yeah, there's a lot of waterfowl in here.
20 Miles from the head of the river, we pushed off near Warner Brothers studios.
We're heading downtown, where the river used to water orange groves.
But if we wanted to, we could take it all the way to the pacific ocean, something Heather knows well.
So tell me something you basically went for a boat rideand got fired, yeah? Well, um, I they tried to suspend me.
In 2008, heather was working for the army corps of engineers when she went public with the fact that the corps was planning to redesignate the river as a drainage ditch.
It would have made it really difficultto keep clean water protections on the creeks and wetlands that drain into this river, and it would have set a really bad precedencefor rivers all around the country.
- They had claimed that you could not boat in here.
- Right.
Oddly enough, the distinction between a river and a drainage ditch was whether or not you could boat in it.
The army corps said you couldn't.
Heather proved you could.
When the army corps found out, they tried to suspend her, sparking a series of legal battles.
And actually, we drew so much public outcry, and the E.
P.
A.
Stepped in and said that this is, in fact, a navigable waterway.
What we're doing right now proves this is a river.
And so, legally, it should be protected.
So is this clean water, relatively speaking? - Uh, I definitely would not drink it - Yeah, okay.
But it's fine for boating in.
- You can really get cooking on this thing.
- Right.
You okay back there? I'm a little heavier than you.
I must lipped it there.
- You're doing a good job with paddling.
- Oh, thanks a lot.
So how close is this part of the river to what it originally was? Well, this is as close as you're gonna get.
- This river used to support steelhead trout, grizzly bears, it was a dense, lush forest.
- Right.
Heather explains to me that the river was the life blood of young L.
A.
It's why the Spanish founded a pueblo here in 1781, and for ages, it has watered the valley and L.
A.
basin.
Look at that.
We're going straight into downtown L.
A.
Now you have an alternate route downtown.
So far, on our river tour, we've been surrounded by trees, grass, and wildlife.
It's been easy to forget that the riveris almost entirely lined with concrete.
But as we hit downtown, that reality couldn't be more obvious.
So why is it like this? The first answer is massive flooding.
You may not realize it, but the L.
A.
river gets 40 inches of rain a year, as much as the Mississippi, and floods have killed more people in L.
A.
county than earthquakes.
When L.
A.
's population was exploding in the 20th century, modern Los Angeles set up shop right in the flood plain, ignoring the ancient wisdom of native Americans, who chose to live on higher ground.
The great flood of 1938 claimed over 100 lives and left thousands homeless.
But plenty of other cities deal with floods, so why did L.
A.
do the most drastic thing imaginableand entomb the river in concrete? The demand was a public demand, am I wrong? I mean, these floods were bad.
I mean, people died, huge amounts of property damage.
What they really wanted to do was to maximize the amount of development that could happen, so what they wanted to do was buildright up to the edges of the river.
- It was really to facilitate the massive developmentof the Los Angeles basin.
- Right.
By the 1920s, L.
A.
's first real estate moguls, men like Harry Chandler and Moses sherman, had made a fortune buying up most of the San Fernando valley.
Then investors turned their sights on new territory the land around the river.
They pressured the U.
S.
government into giving the river a makeover.
The army corps went to work designing, then building the longest concrete-lined river in the world.
It took 30 years, 3.
5 million barrels of concrete, and over $100 million to channelize the riverand its tributaries.
It's much wider and deeper than the original river.
This system oh, hello.
Uh-oh, we've got a visitor here.
Ironically, we're talking about raging flood waters.
So the cops have told us we got to get out of here.
Um, they're kind enough to let us stay a few minutes.
They explained that it's very, very dangerous down here, and a couple guys were swept away just last week.
So let's get out of here.
The open channel we're leaving is actually only one small part of a vast system of "tributaries" that run beneath all of L.
A.
, and luckily, heather knows how to get me inside.
- So we're just gonna go through this fence right here.
- All right.
We need to move quickly, or risk another run in with the authorities.
- Oh, man, try not to break my fingers.
- All right.
Okay, Don, so stay close to me.
I love this woman.
Coming down.
This is great.
All right.
Right.
So now we are underneath the city.
This is just gigantic.
It really is gigantic, and it will get bigger than this as well.
There's thousands of miles of these storm drains - Really? - Underneath the city.
So everything that flows through here basically pours eventually into the L.
A.
river channel - Right.
- And straight out to the ocean.
No matter where people are in this city, watering their lawns in Compton or washing their car in Beverly Hills, they are connected to this riverby a network of tunnels underneath them.
It's a network close to 5,000 miles long.
That's practically all the way to New York and back.
And even on a dry day, like today, it's carrying 100 million gallons of water into the open channel and straight out to sea.
I mean, we're looking at a tiny little trickle here of regular water from regular life, but this is designed for flash flood conditions, in which case, I would be swept out to sea.
All this concrete is here to make the water flow quickly, with as little friction as possible, but maybe this isn't the best solution for a city where drought is the norm.
Rather than innovate and figure out how to integrate the whole thing, - they just made a lot more concreteto get rid of the water faster and easier.
- Right.
We're actually trying to go back and fix this.
What they can do is they can actually collect the water in these cisterns along side streets And actually at people's houses that you can use to water your garden.
Heather is part of a growing movement to return the river and its watershed into something more like its natural form.
It would protect against flash floods, look good, and provide the thirsty city with extra fresh water.
Oh, my God, there you go.
That's the river.
This is L.
A.
, so I guess anything is possible.
As the sun goes down, I have only a few minutes to enjoy the weirdest and most unexpected river trip I've ever taken.
But I get it, why Heather, and activists like her, want to save it.
We've passed neighborhoods that used to be orange groves and are now the very definition of urban blight.
With a little bit of work, who knows what they could be again? Our cameras get the first glimpse inside the tunnel that keeps L.
A.
alive.
- If it stopped? - L.
A.
goes dry.
There's not enough water.
And a hidden Nazi compound in the hills near Malibu.
This place is an outrageous piece of wreckage.
when Los Angeles was born, it got its water from the L.
A.
river, but as the city grew up, the river wasn't enough.
So how did L.
A.
's founders provide water for the millions who came here? They stole it.
I'm driving north through the mojave desert to find out how the city's masterminds channeled water from hundreds of Miles away and defied a desert to build a city.
Downtown L.
A.
is about 100 miles in that direction, and right now this big black pipe in this cany on here is full of water on its way to Los Angeles, right up that Mountain.
So what makes the impossible possible? That's a question you really can't stop asking about Los Angeles, and the answer usually involves genius engineering and huge amounts ambition, mixed with plenty of controversy and scandal, just like that pipe the L.
A.
aqueduct.
If you've seen the movie "Chinatown,"this story might sound familiar, because the L.
A.
noir classicwas based on a scandalous and true tale.
- How you doing? - Hey, guys.
I'm meeting up with Fred Barker and Rick Mayfield who work for the department of water and power.
They're giving me special access to the aqueduct.
In fact, my crew will be the first ever to film inside of it.
The aqueduct spans a desert and a mountain range, with 233 miles of channels, tunnels, and pipes, all to bring water to L.
A.
In 1908, it must have been it was a miracle.
It was.
A lot of people that lived in L.
A.
, they thought it was a fool's errand to try to build such a long aqueduct across the desert.
You have mountains.
You have valleys.
You have canyons.
You can imagine in 1908 what it was like to be out herebuilding this thing very, very remote, very dangerous, very rocky.
Man.
This is the aqueduct right here.
We're looking at this in a canyon.
How is it that the water even gets up this hill? I mean, is there a pump down there? - No.
The north end of this pipe is about 10 feet higher than where we are at the south end - Oh, I see.
So that 10 feet of elevation difference pushes the water down and up the other side.
And this is the case for the whole of the aqueduct, yeah? The whole aqueduct works the same way.
On its way to Los Angeles, it drops over 2,500 feet, and the water moves solely by gravity.
- And we're going inside this thing? - And we're gonna go inside.
I can't imagine how miners from a century ago managed to build a structure that has been able to keep up with L.
A.
's constantly growing population.
In 100 years, no one has ever filmed what this looks like on the inside.
No one's ever gone down there with a camera, so there's a first time for everything, huh? L.
A.
aqueduct.
- Hey, guys.
- Hey.
- Your feet wet? - I did.
This is cool.
- So this is the actual I mean, we're looking at a 100-year-old tunnel here.
- 100-year-old stuff.
Okay, so now we don't go down that way? No.
We go down that way, and we won't be able to get back.
It'll be a slippery slope.
- So that's the actual pipe coming up the hill? - The pipe coming up that we were looking at.
- So you fall down there, you fall about 100 feet down and drown.
Nice.
- Yeah, and drown.
This aqueduct carries almost 200 million gallons of water every day to L.
A.
but every once in awhile, parts are drained for critical maintenance, giving us a rare chance to look inside.
Let's take a ride.
We're about 100 miles south of the Owens river source, heading right through a mountainin a 2 1/2-mile stretch of tunnel.
So how much of this is the original tunnel? Pretty much 99.
9% is original.
Okay, so something this is all different here.
So this is solid granite above our heads? Right, right.
This is the Mountain.
- In this section of the tunnel, the raw rock ceiling, there's no need for the top - Yep.
But what happens is the concrete forms like a shelf and some of the workers left some of their debris behind when they were constructing the tunnel.
Nails, tobacco tins, and old toolsare left undisturbed, as a tribute the the men who risked their lives 100 years ago.
Look up here.
This is the Mountain itself, granite, which has been blasted out.
Indeed, you can even see here, here's a drill hole, which has been packed with dynamite.
They blow out the rock, ship that out, layer the space with concrete to the precise dimensions they need, and then hand-line it with this plaster.
This surface I'm touching here, 100 years old, right? This thing just keeps on working a century later.
It was an engineering marvel and the vision of a man named William Mulholland.
Mulholland was an Irish immigrant, and he goes back to the beginnings of Los Angeles.
Yeah, he arrived in Los Angeles in 1877 at the age of 21.
So he was a very young man, and he spent the rest of his life in Los Angeles, bringing water to the city.
So he starts as a ditch digger, basically.
He dug the ditches, kept the dead animals out, and pulled the weeds out.
He slowly moves his way up the ladder.
That's right, he worked his way up to head of the entire department of water and power.
Mulholland saw the writing on the wall L.
A.
was growing, and it needed a new source of water.
His friend, former mayor FredEaton, suggested the Owens river valley, a couple of hundred miles north of L.
A.
, where he had been quietly buying up property from local farmers.
But taking water from the valley community would come back to haunt them.
Construction involved 100,000 workers tunneling close to 20 feet a dayover four and a half years.
The truly startling fact is that this is not just history we're talking about.
- This is in use today.
- That's right.
This is an active asset of the city.
It carries water to the city year in and year out and has since 1913.
And if it stopped, L.
A.
goes dry? L.
A.
goes dry.
There's not enough water.
Today, keeping the water flowingstill takes a massive effort.
We've made it 2 miles in, and now I get to see how it's done.
To rip through the crumbling concrete, the D.
W.
P.
has some heavy machinery with a nasty bite.
How you doing? Listen to that thing, huh? It's like the beast is right back here.
L.
A.
gets its water, and all hell breaks loose.
The local people, some of them, began to attack the aqueduct.
Downtown L.
A.
is 100 miles south, and we're deep in the heart of this aqueduct, where the D.
W.
P.
has a big job keeping the water flowing to Los Angeles.
So that's the continuous mine right there.
It's basically coal mining equipment that's been redesigned, adapted, for this use.
The constant moisture has rotted the concrete ceiling, so they're grinding it down to reline it.
I mean, you can imagine the guys in 1908 would have killed to have something like this, I mean, equipment like this to do the job they did by handand with dynamite.
When this aqueduct was first built, would this have you'd basically be doing this with dynamite and stuff, yeah? Can you imagine what these guys would have thought of your job? That's when men were men.
That's when men were men.
Exactly.
I don't know, you look like a man to me.
Okay, so they're stopped down right now.
Every once in awhile, this thing, of course, tangles up on stuff around it.
Look, this is a piece of rebarthey're gonna have to literally cut out of here.
It gives you a chance to take a look at this thing up close.
Look, carbide teeth, hardened steel.
They used to use inverted jackhammers, right, stopers, they were called, to actually knock downbig pieces of only the worst decayed ceiling.
But now they can basically do upwards of 5 to 1,000 feet with this thing just roaring through the tunnel.
100 years ago, the men who built the aqueduct didn't just have to deal with backbreaking work.
They had a violent uprising on their hands.
Once the aqueduct was turned on, the Owens river valley farmland was quickly drained dry, and the people who relied on it weren't too happy.
The local people, some of them, began to attack the aqueduct.
- I mean, this is known as the water wars of California.
- California water war, yes.
Valley farmers banded togetherto stop the water flowing to L.
A.
There was something of a guerilla warfare going on.
They were basically dynamiting parts of the aqueductin order to prevent the flow of the water.
Exactly.
They were trying to stop L.
A.
from actually getting the water.
And how long did this go on? From 1924 to about 1928.
Ultimately, Mulholland prevailed.
In fact, today, the city still imports 90% of its waterfrom the farthest reaches of California.
- So end of the line here, huh? - End of the line.
We've made it 2 1/2 Miles through a Mountain, and we're coming out the other side.
Daylight.
- So, uh, how do we get out? - Right up here.
Well, there must be a ladder around here somewhere.
But Mulholland's stunning achievement would be followedby one of the worst disasters in California history.
I'm driving west of the aqueduct to find a place most people don't even know exists.
You see, for Mulholland, the aqueduct wasn't enough.
In 1926, he completed his final project, the St.
Francis dam, at the end of this unmarked road.
Let's see up here.
Yeah, you can see some piping.
Ooh, there it is.
That is the concrete, a crumbled rubble, of what was the St.
Francis dam.
The dam held back enough water to supply all of L.
A.
for an entire year.
Experts warned the site was geologically unstable, but Mulholland ignored them.
Check it out.
Look at that.
I mean, all of this is basically the rubble, the remains, of what was a 190-foot-high dam.
One of the, you know, proud achievements of the early L.
A.
water days.
On march 12,1928,the dam gave way, Saint Francis dam Unleashing a 78-foot wave on a 65-mile rampage to the ocean.
Pacific Ocean Los Angeles it destroyed everything in its path.
Hundreds and hundreds of peopleperished in this night.
They never declare exactly how many people died.
The estimates run from 360 to upwards of 800 people.
There were bodies found as far South as Mexico washed out to sea, drifted down with the current.
I mean, this was a huge, huge, huge tragedy.
And it ended Mulholland's career.
He took full responsibility.
And never returned to public life.
The cost of building a city on the edge of a desert was higher than anyone imagined.
Whoo, that thing's tall.
A bird's-eye view of the real industrythat keeps L.
A.
pumping.
There was a reason men like Mulholland spent millions in public funds to bring water to Los Angeles and grow a city in the desert, Hollywood bl but it wasn't the movie industry or the nice weather that originally lured people to L.
A.
It was oil.
Los Angeles is the largest urban oil field in the world, and it's one of the only places on earth where active oil Wells are also valuable residential real estate.
So this is, quite honestly, one of the most unusual neighborhoodsi've ever seen in my life very, very exclusive properties sitting amidst these working oil pump units.
They had to totally reengineer this entire hill, right? 'Cause imagine the pipelines.
Take a look at that.
I mean, not bad smooth, quiet.
Not a bad neighbor, right? The L.
A.
basin has almost 30,000 active rigs.
Back in the 1920s, california was the largest producer of oilin the world, Pacific ocean Hollywood downtown and you could see the rigs everywhere the 20th century fox lot, the miracle mile, the future site of dodger stadium.
Today, in places like Beverly Hills, the rigs are camouflaged, but south of downtown, you can't miss the fact that L.
A.
is built on an oil field.
If I was living next to an oil pump, I'd want to know exactly what was going on there, but the oil industry is highly secretive and extremely restrictive.
To get access, you need to know someone on the inside.
How you doing, robert? - How are you, sir? - Good, how are you? - An oil man in a prius? - Yes, of course.
- Saving saving the world.
- Modern thinker.
Robert Porter is a bona fide oil man.
His family has been drilling for over a generation.
Well, my dad was a driller.
20th Century Fox had 3 drill sites.
I used to go there and play on the sets.
So I'm looking at neighborhoods and businesses that have literally pumping derricks right in their parking lots and their backyards all over here.
- I think there's maybe 1,500-2,000.
- No way.
Yeah, and those units are called pumping units.
The Derrick is actually the piece of equipment that drills the well.
Yeah, I was gonna say that, actually.
Luckily, Robert's getting me access to a live drill platform right in the middle of signal hill, one of the L.
A.
basin's most densely populated areas.
- Hey, Kevin.
- Hey, guys.
- How you doing? I'm Don.
- Good.
Hey, Don.
So what's actually happening here? It's a long-term idle well.
Kevin laney director of rig operations signal hill petroleum we're gonna reactivate it and put it on production.
How long ago was this well drilled? This well, I believe, was drilled in the '40s.
- In the '40s? - Yeah, a lot of our Wells were drilled '20s, '30s, and '40s.
- That's amazing.
- Yeah.
So there's that much oil undergroundthat for 50 years absolutely, yeah.
There's still a lot of oil left.
One of the world's largest oil fields here in signal hill.
- Amazing.
- It was the Saudi Arabia of the '30s.
No kidding.
Before there were suburbs in Southern California, there were derricks so many that signal hill earned the name porcupine hill.
Drilling for oil in the early days meant a geyser of crudefilling an open pit and being carted off from there, but as more and more people came to chase the oil, those pits were paved over for premium real estate.
The city grew up right on top of the oil field and production never stopped.
And today, drilling for oilis still a dangerous line of work.
Just, uh, don't want to get too close to any moving parts.
- Yeah.
- But we're fine.
So this pipe is going down this pipe has a cutter attached to it 5,000 feet in the ground.
So this is a hollow pipe that basically goes down 5,000 feet? Yeah, that's correct.
So I can drop something I'm not gonna do it, but I can drop something down there, it'd go down? Yeah, you'd be in big trouble.
- I would not do that.
- Yeah, yeah.
Roughnecks here have been doing the same job for almost 100 years, while the city around them keeps growing.
If they were in Texas or Saudi Arabia, they'd be out in the middle of nowhere, so I want to climb to the top of this 55-foot derrick to see what a city on top of an oil field looks like.
Whoo, that thing's tall.
- Here's your safety right here.
- All right, okay.
Keep it on at all times.
Here goes.
- Just take your time.
- Yeah, thanks.
Wow, that's a long way up.
All right, so, uh, not looking down.
It is a long way up here.
You can feel this whole thing is rocking back and forth.
Wow, man, I mean, just one aspect of this incredibly dangerous, treacherous work being done, just to pull this oil out of the ground.
I mean, if you look around us, it's one of the busiest freeways in socal over there, long beach airport over there.
Just beyond that lot, suburbs.
I mean, we're in the middle of a place where people are busy living and doing their thing, and here we are drilling for oil.
It would be very interesting situation where you have oil being pumped out inside of an urban environment.
We've come a long way since the days of open pits and deafening machinery, but the end result is still the same.
- There it is black gold, baby.
- Here we go.
- No water.
- Look at that.
This is why people came to L.
A.
Oil and the money they could make from it.
With all the people moving here because of the boom, the oil industry had no choice but to adapt.
That's the L.
A.
way, though have your oil field and build on it, too.
And it was one man's wonderland on the west coast.
I'm hunting down what's left of a tycoon's wild vision for L.
A.
with the discovery ofoil, L.
A.
's population tripled, and all those people needed to be entertained.
In the entertainment capital of the world, before there were talkies, there was Venice Beach.
So this is Venice Beach kind of sexy, kind of seedy.
Long before this place was a beach side tourist trap/yuppie enclave, venice was basically a lot of low-priced, marshland real estate, that is, until a brilliant tobacco tycoon named Abbot Kinney came here and decided it should be something else altogether.
A glamorous re-creation of its Italian namesake, Venice.
15 miles west of downtown, Venice has always been geographically and culturally on the fringe.
Local expert Todd Von Hoffman is gonna show me what's left of Kinney's original dream.
- This all-evocative St.
Mark's place in venice.
- Exactly.
It looks Italian because it was supposed to.
Venice Venice, Italy, Venice, California.
Exactly.
He wanted to create one city entirely in his vision.
Kinney saw the marshlandas the perfect place to re-create venice's most famous feature, the canals, and he had plenty of money to throw down.
He had made an incredible fortune in the tobacco business with his brothers, and yeah, back in those pre-income tax days, you could do quite a lot.
Venice had a massive pleasure pier with carnival rides and games, but the main attraction was 16 miles of canals.
It was one man's wonderland on the west coast.
We're actually looking at Abbot Kinney's lagoon right here.
- Really? - Yeah.
So this traffic circle used to be water, basically? Exactly.
This grand avenue, is the original grand canal.
- No way.
- He first started digging that in August of 1904.
That is fascinating.
So we're basically sort of seeing the layout of the original old venice here.
Exactly.
This was sort of ground zero for the waterway system.
It took thousands of workers one year to transform the swamp into a paradise.
When they finished in 1905, most of venice was reachable by boat with canals refreshed by pipes that connected the ocean nearby.
So these canals have been paved over, but there are still canals here today? Yes.
We can actually see them, if we just go down this way.
Kinney's canals were so popular, that a private land-owning company capitalized on his vision, building these canals a year later.
This is all built just a couple of years after kinney created his canal system for venice.
This is gorgeous.
So basically, these canals connect like they did back in the day of Abbot Kinney.
They do.
This is really what Kinney was striving for.
This is the idyllic life-on-the-water existencethat he was thinking about.
Yeah.
In 1929, less than 10 years after Kinney died, his playground was already becoming pass by now talkies and gin joints were all the rage, and with more and more people coming to L.
A.
, Kinney's dream was paved over to make way for a new one a dream of speed, convenience, and freedom.
The car had arrived in Los Angeles.
So this is original, and it goes under what? Under a bridge there.
All right, I'm gonna take a look down there.
Do you want to come? Uh, no.
So down here is what looks like a storm drainage system that now goes under venice boulevard.
But in the day, the whole canal system kept on going for a number of miles, so I'm gonna take a look, and see if we can walk right back there.
See what's what.
So this is it.
This is the end of the system today.
Let's see what you can see through here.
I yeah, kind of deep water there.
I don't want to get my boots wet.
So All right.
lt's pretty ironic.
Abbott Kinney's 100-year-old canal system is intact.
His vision that way, but under here is the way to the other 16 miles of canals, now covered up by the modern city.
Let's take a look.
Whoa, it's deep.
Now there's about a foot of pure muck that my feet are going through, and then I can feel the concrete slabthat's been poured here.
Oh, man.
Sea water, right? So you've got barnacles.
And it stinks.
Yuck.
Okay, so that's that is really the end there.
Storm drain.
Moving on.
Now, as you can see, filled in, covered up with the muck from venice above, but the great ironyis that no matter how much coverage there's been, venice is still there.
It's still eclectic.
It's still a little weird.
It's still, you know, a carnival.
Oh, man, it is gooey.
It doesn't get much creepier than Nazis hiding out next door.
They wanted people to stay out.
The walls a foot thick.
Los angelesis an impossible place brought to life by visionaries like Abbot Kinney and Mulholland.
But a city where anything is possible also attracts a darker breed of dreamers.
The remote hills above the city offer the perfect kind of seclusion for twisted groups, like the manson family, to build their own warped utopias.
And in the 1930s, this is where a wealthy couple built a secret compound to pave the way for an America ruled by Nazis.
Randy.
While many of the details are unknown, local historian Randy young has pieced together an amazing story.
he's taking me into the hills north of Santa Monica to a secluded estate known as Murphy ranch.
This is way before world war II, so nazism is not necessarily viewed, at the time, as the great scourge of the earththat it eventually becomes.
It was not.
it was worried about, but it was not against the law.
It turns out there was good reason to worry.
In 1938, over 20,000 American fascists rallied in Madison Square Garden.
But here in L.
A.
, nazism took ona more secretive and paranoid form.
You can see that they have a bit of barbed wire going on here.
I mean, really, clearly, these people were concerned about invaders, you know, somebody coming in and finding them there.
They wanted people to stay out.
It still feels that way.
Wow, man, that's intense-looking.
Wow, I mean, this is a very, very fancy piece of wrought-iron work.
That was designed by Paul Williams, one of the finest architects in Los Angeles.
Paul Williams was a very famous African-American architect.
Correct.
They may have been Nazis, but they were Nazis with taste.
Of course they were.
I'm counting one, two, three, four there's eight locks on here.
- Yes.
- Eight padlocks on this, but somebody's done the job for us.
Absolutely.
Randy tells me the owners, Winona and Norman Stephens, broke ground in 1933.
Because they were so secretive, there are no known photos of them, but they did leave behind the blueprints for what appeared to be a grand estate.
But the evidence here shows they were planning more than just building a giant mansion in the hills.
There's a structure over here.
What is this? Um, this is the huge water tank.
- It is insanely big.
- Yep.
Damn.
How much water can this hold? 400,000 gallons.
And it was full? It was full, and, in fact, it had a roof over it.
So this is a dead give away.
I mean, nobody with one family living in the hills needs a water tank this big.
Correct.
So they were basically trying to createa closed system here, - a self-sustaining community- Correct.
And this was part of that.
They could close the gates, be behind the barbed wire, and they could be invisible for two years.
Adolf Hitler always felt that the United States governmentwould collapse and anarchy would break out.
This was to be a little model community where government could be offered.
The Stephens envisioned the ranch as a safe havenfrom the chaos in America, a place where they could eventually help Hitler restore order.
They were followers of the silver shirts 15,000 California fascists who believed in Hitler and the occult.
But here at Murphy ranch, the Stephens' main advisor was a mysterious man from Germany known only as herr Schmitt.
He brought a radio and code books, and so he was there to basically give espionage intelligence to Germany.
- He's a German spy.
- He was a German spy.
This was his secret base, just a few miles from Hollywood.
- Damn, what is this? - This is the power station.
It is cast concrete 1-foot thick.
Amazing.
A very substantial structure.
It seems like every graffiti artist in socal has been here, but they probably have no ideatheir canvas was a Nazi strong hold.
There was a generator there and right there.
In fact, this thing looks like it was built to withst and a direct bomb hit.
Check this out.
Look at the catwalk.
Okay, this was built, you know, 75 years ago, this was put together.
It's still showing very little sign of decay.
The walls, right, a foot thick.
I mean, it is downright eerie to stand in here and imagine business as usual, you know, for Nazis.
It is supposed to be that seed where American fascism would grow.
This is behind the power station here, and you can see where these are the fuel lines coming in and apparently ran straight up here to a fuel tank, a 20,000-gallon fuel tank.
Damn.
So they would have been able to be back here for upwards of a year or more without needing, obviously, fuel, or for that matter, water.
Ooh, this is nice.
To complete their Nazi utopia, the Stephens were planning to build a 22-bedroom mansion, but by 1941,their money was running low, and they were living here.
This was the original garage and the quarters for the chauffer.
I see the garage part there.
- Well, it has had better years.
- Yes.
It burned down in 1978, but this became, actually, the main household for the Stephens.
This is where they were gonna live temporarily until the big mansion was built - Right.
- Because it was the only structure, so this is where they would have their meetings.
What happened at those meetings? They could very well have been planning the logistics of the fuhrers' takeover of L.
A.
We'll never know, because the F.
B.
I.
raided the ranch in 1941.
The day after pearl harbor, December 8,1941,they shut this place down, and I know for a fact that the silver shirts stopped official operation December 8, 1941.
The F.
B.
I.
records are still sealed, so we may never know exactly what happened here.
This place is an outrageous piece of wreckage, but it was their outrageous vision, and L.
A.
is where they chose to make it happen.
You know, it's why anybody comes here, right? To reinvent yourself, where you can be anything and do anything well, almost.
L.
A.
it's always been fertile ground for dreamers.
Some build, some destroy, but they've all left their mark.
Who knows how the next generation of visionaries will once again transfrom the impossible city.