Off Limits (2011) s01e03 Episode Script
San Francisco
Look at these guns.
I surrender.
Welcome to San Francisco, where you have to break a few rules to see the real city a brutal 150-year-old dungeon.
This is four people living in this tiny, little cell.
A ghost ship where a president almost died And if this ship goes down, they are going down with it.
And black ops bases.
As far as they know, something really bad is gonna take place.
Take off your tie-dye This is a wild place to work.
And put on a hard hat I guess we should be putting this on.
This is San Francisco "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.
s01e03 I got an e-mail from the San Quentin people.
You cannot wear jeans.
You have to wear khakis.
- Who are you here to see? - John.
If it's raining, you cannot bring in a pointy umbrella.
These are a pair pair of glasses.
"Hostages will not be recognized for bargaining purposes.
" Go ahead and spin around for me.
San Quentin is one of the toughest prisons in the world.
Getting in isn't easy.
But there's something amazing behind these walls the brutal 150-year-old dungeon that helped make a great city possible San Francisco.
The bay area is beautiful and romantic, home of free love and fine living.
It's a progressive melting pot of old-school hippies and 21st-century computer geeks.
But if you were here 150 years ago, you wouldn't recognize the place.
After the gold rush of 1849, the population exploded, and there was no real law and order.
There were only 35 cops and tens of thousands of drunken, desperate men.
The murder rate soared, and vigilantes lynched suspects at will.
With San Fran in chaos, the brand-new state of California was on the verge of collapse.
The solution was a prison.
Alcatraz was still just a small fort when construction started on the first public building in California San Quentin state prison.
And to control the violent men locked up inside, they built a dungeon.
That's what I'm on my way to see.
Slowly but surely through here, 'cause our camera crew has to get cleared as well, all wanded up and everything.
My escort through the yard is retired guard John gladsen.
Hey, Johnny! He worked at the prison for 27 years.
He's been stabbed and has survived numerous riots.
So John's a former prison guard here, and as we're standing in here he's just retired all of his friends, all of the guards are coming out.
It's like, you know, old home week for him.
Okay, what happens is these doors never open at the same time.
It's called a Sally port.
And this is our last line of stopping any kind of escape is right here.
Okay, now this gate can open.
Now this is the, uh the secure area.
You are now inside of San Quentin proper.
Unbelievable.
Okay, so now we're seeing the population of these guys.
Orange inmates means they just came back to prison, - or they're first-termers.
- Okay.
Yeah, you always try to start reading the fellas, you know? 'Cause with their tattoos the tattoos will tell you a lot.
This is a wild place to work.
How many prisoners are in here - Uh, about - Generally speaking? - Around 5,000.
- 5,000 people are in here? San Quentin is home to gangs like the Aryan brotherhood and serial killer Richard "the night stalker" Ramirez, who murdered 13 people in their homes.
This has been a violent place for over 150 years, for both prisoners and guards.
This over here is all the prison guards that were murdered.
Sergeant hal burchfield we put his marker up here.
And I was here when he got murdered.
A guy took a spear and speared out and caught him in the, uh in the heart.
You know, he went really quick.
Today the most violent and dangerous criminals are put here the adjustment center.
This is where 675 men sit on death row.
Back in the 1800s, troublemakers ended up here, a horrific punishment cell block known as "the dungeon.
" And this is the entrance to the dungeon.
" And this is the original obviously the original building of this.
Right.
The building was nearly knocked down a few years ago, until old records revealed its dark historical significance.
Wow.
So this is the original San Quentin.
Oh, yeah, here you go.
I mean, this is the first prison in California.
Whew.
This is the last remaining structure from the original prison.
This is a grim place.
It is.
It is.
Oh, boy.
All right, so this is not big.
There are only how many cells in here? 14 cells.
All right, so this is a single cell.
No, this was four people.
Oh, this is four people living in this tiny, little cell.
- It's - Yeah.
And no toilet facilities they used to give 'em a bucket.
Really? Food was was like, you know, uh, - full of maggots and stuff like that - Just really bad.
Just gruel, yeah.
- This would have been a solid steel door out here - Okay.
Coming down.
It would have had a slot cut out of the bottom right here with another little door on it - Okay.
- So that they could push in the food.
All right.
Is there any kind of slit through No light.
No light.
No light, no ventilation.
Time in the dungeon was the penalty for bad behavior in the main prison.
And the guards made sure it was hellish in here.
And would they have some kind of bedding, I guess, in here? Uh, no.
No.
- No bedding? - No bedding.
In order to keep the guys off the floor, they would, uh they would water the floor down so that the guys couldn't, uh couldn't sit down.
You know, so anything just to make life miserable.
Wow.
So this was the ultimate punishment that the guards had over those prisoners.
If you did something to a guard up on the yard, he would walk you down here and put you in the dungeon.
And he was the only one who could get you out of the dungeon.
Really? Okay.
So you sure hoped he didn't go off for a few days.
The dungeon was the ultimate threat.
But there were other horrors, like back-breaking labor.
I mean, back then this was also kind of an industry, wasn't it? Oh, this was straight-up slave labor.
California governor John a.
Mcdougal was one of the first to cash in on convict labor.
A failed gold miner and businessman, mcdougal finally succeeded when he set up a system for leasing out the prisoners as unpaid workers.
They would call over to the the sheriff of San Francisco and say, "hey, we need people that know how to do lay brick you know, bricklayers.
" - So they'd go out and arrest bricklayers.
- They'd arrest them.
No way.
If anyone complained, they could probably expect to end up here in the dungeon, getting special treatment.
Now up here are those little hooks that they would, uh oh, yeah.
You know, you could hang a guy off of, you know, by putting the chain up there.
And each one of these would be for basically holding a prisoner while you were maybe getting cleaning out a cell or something? Yeah, getting his attention.
The men were flogged or tied up and sprayed with hoses and early version of waterboarding.
I mean, I would never want to go back to a thing like this, where, you know, it was actually mistreatment.
In the 1940s, abuse was finally banned, and the dungeon was shut down then converted into storage.
It was a horrific torture chamber, but there's no question it got results.
Ten years after it opened, the murder rate in San Francisco was cut in half.
And buildings other than saloons and brothels started going up.
You're inside here in the late 1800s, just after the gold rush in San Francisco, a time of incredible prosperity but also incredible chaos, all right? Out of that prosperity comes a lot of criminals that need to be dealt with really crazy town then.
They build this place to deal with that problem.
Today San Quentin is one of the last surviving witnesses to the city's tough beginnings and evidence that building a beautiful city can be an ugly business.
It's big.
Prepare to be blown away by a battleship in the bay.
- Look at these guns.
- Unbelievable.
And The spot where scientology began.
Whew, it's kinda spooky, isn't it? San Francisco bay is a magnet for tourists.
They visit Alcatraz, sail under the golden gate bridge, or hop a ferry for sausalito.
Nearby but off the radar, there are other unbelievable sights with amazing stories.
They're hard to find, even harder to get into.
I'm heading to one of the most remarkable of these hidden treasures.
Just north of the city is an entire fleet of Navy ghost ships, most of them destined for the scrap heap.
Oh, man, this is an awesome sight, right? I'm looking out at suisun bay here at these ghostly apparitions of a fleet of U.
S.
naval ships.
We're going to the "u.
S.
S.
Iowa," which is a huge ship right out there.
The "u.
S.
S.
Iowa" launched in 1943, and after five decades of warfare, there are incredible stories on board, including a friendly fire incident that nearly killed f.
D.
R.
And top-secret military tech that gave birth to silicon valley.
But its days here in the bay could be numbered.
Hey, John.
- Great to meet you.
- Likewise.
U.
S.
Naval expert John garvey is my guide.
This is an active military facility, and you need special clearance from the U.
S.
Navy to get on board.
- So get ready.
- Okay.
- Government property.
- Can I have all your ids, please? - Hello and good morning.
Yes.
- Good morning.
Uh, I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss some of - the safety concerns that we have - Okay.
- Especially on the "Iowa.
" - Yeah.
I gotta wear this the whole day? You wear it the whole day.
Uh, trust me.
There's places on the vessel you may hit your head, and it does hurt.
Okay.
The ships are moored about 1/2 mile out in the bay.
So I have to hop a ride on a small transport boat.
All right.
I'm cold today.
It's cold.
It's incredible, isn't it? It really is incredible.
I mean, you don't expect it to have the emotional impact that it does, being I mean, first of all, they're just awesomely sized.
They're big objects in the water.
But also you get a sense, a distinct sense of the history of of, I mean, a century of warfare.
There are 53 ships anchored here today.
At 1 time there were 500.
But within five years, they'll all be gone scrapped or towed away.
This historic relics are incredibly toxic and are poisoning the bay with asbestos and lead.
So that sign says "restricted area.
Keep off 500 feet.
" Those signs are posted all over the place.
If you're out here fishing in these waters, uh, and you come anywhere close, they know you're here, and there's patrols around these ships.
Oh, there it is.
Look at that baby, man the "u.
S.
S.
Iowa.
" I remember when I was a kid, and I used to build little models, you know, and I built the "u.
S.
S.
New Jersey," which was an "Iowa"-class ship, just like this one.
I actually recognize this.
The "Iowa" is three football fields long and towers 15 stories high.
It's the largest, fastest, most powerful battleship ever built by the U.
S.
Yeah, what's most impressive is these three, uh, turrets.
Right.
The 9 16-inch guns They're very, very powerful.
It's big.
This is awesome.
This is the very same ladder that thousands of sailors climbed heading off to war in the pacific, Korea, and Vietnam.
I'm getting to see what they saw as they came aboard.
She is beautiful.
Look at this.
It is so enormous, right? - It's a floating fortress.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
The "Iowa's" fate is uncertain.
I may be one of the last people ever to freely explore the ship.
Look at these guns.
Unbelievable.
Insane thing.
Wow.
I give up.
I surrender.
I mean, look at this.
This is the distinguishing feature, most obviously the 16-inch guns.
They've got this barrel covered up here.
And it can shoot it shoots a 2,700-pound shell More than 20 Miles with incredible accuracy.
Each one of these there's three separate guns here, and then there's two turrets.
That is some sight to see, isn't it? The massive guns are impressive, but they'd be useless without the fire controls and technology found below deck.
And that's what I want to see.
Okay.
- In we go, huh? - Okay, there you go.
The tech that ran this ship is the product of military r & d money and brilliant engineers, the same combo that built silicon valley.
Don, we're heading down towards Broadway.
We're heading deep into the ship, to the main passage known as "Broadway.
" Look how long this hallway is.
Unbelievable.
And all of this is basically running this ship, right? This is the mechanical working.
- This is all computers.
- Yes.
This is the internal communications unit, where the computerized gunnery controls are located.
I mean, it's very complicated machinery even now to my eye.
This was this is representative of what kind of technology comes along with the military, and therefore was here in San Francisco.
They they had to have a lot of brainpower here.
This equipment was upgraded in the '70s and '80s, 40 years after the first partnership between military money and bay area brilliance.
One of the "Iowa's" first upgrades in 1944 was an electronic radar jamming system.
It's development was supervised by bay area Professor Frederick terman.
After the war, he taught at Stanford university and brought big bucks for military research with him.
Stanford produced computer pioneers, including the founders of hp hewlett and packard.
During the cold war, ships like the "Iowa" got high-tech upgrades, and silicon valley kept growing.
Today businesses like intel, teledyne, and apple make San Francisco the hub of the high-tech universe.
It is pretty, uh, exciting to be around so much equipment that within my lifetime would have been highly classified, right? I would've never gotten this close to, ou know, what is really the root of what now we're so used to, okay? The very technology that is behind the laptops, the smartphones, the software we take for granted now, you can find right here in the belly of a battleship.
I've seen the tangible, physical links between the military and silicon valley, but there are a lot more stories to find on board the "Iowa.
" You know, they're giving the orders right here.
The president comes under fire, and the "Iowa's" crew has seconds to save him.
Going to battle stations.
YTET- ÃóÃó San Francisco is just over 160 years old, but crucial phases of its history, like its military past, are already fading from memory.
I'm just north of the city, exploring the decommissioned battleship "u.
S.
S.
Iowa.
" And that's a floor below.
I guess we're down towards the bottom of the ship here.
I've seen how battle tech launched silicon valley.
And now military expert John garvey is gonna show me how the ship was the world war ii era prototype.
For air force one.
Here we go.
So this is the presidential suite in here.
Yes.
Look at that - Wow, look at this sweet room here.
- Some, uh some space.
I'll take it.
In 1943,f.
D.
R.
Needed to get to tehran to meet with allied leaders Churchill and Stalin their first face-to-face strategy session of the war.
That meant a treacherous 3,000-mile journey through enemy waters.
It was basically secret.
It was similar to president Obama landing in Afghanistan unannounced.
Right.
So if you're gonna ship a president to a secret conference, you do it on this boat here.
On the "Iowa," f.
D.
R.
Had the ultimate shipboard luxury elbow room and So this is the only bathtub in the whole U.
S.
Navy.
I'm standing right next to where Franklin Roosevelt essentially was sitting on his way to basically planning the victory of world war ii.
That's incredible.
Look over here.
You wonder what you know, what communications went out on this phone.
Oh, look, it's his razor.
The commander in chief slept here, but all orders on the "Iowa" came from one place the bridge.
That's where I'm heading next.
But getting through this maze of tiny passageways won't be easy.
Okay, watch your head.
Excuse me.
- Nice.
- Yes.
It's called the big stick.
Controls here.
Laugh and learn.
The ship is so massive, it's easy to imagine getting lost down here Zone four.
For days.
Don, we're going to the battle station over here.
Going to battle stations.
Look at that.
Look at this.
Man, when they went to battle stations, they meant business, right? So in event of battle, you know, actual attack, they are coming into this this room here.
I mean, just oh, look at this.
That is amazing.
This is the battle bridge.
This is the citadel, right? Look at this.
These are I mean, what is that? 18-inch-thick steel.
And you gotta get a sense of this thing, all right? Come around here.
So you see this is a whole circular container, basically of steel.
When the ship was cruising, the commanding officer's station was here on the bridge.
When the battle stations alarm sounded, the C.
O.
climbed into the battle bridge.
Okay, so those two doors, one on either side, get sealed off, you know, majorly craned off.
You are inside this thing till the bitter end.
Each one of these there's two of these are the periscopes, okay? That's actually seeing out to the battle.
Look, you're you know, they're giving the orders right here, uh, through the squawk box, down communicating with the gunners, with the engine room.
And if this ship goes down, they are going down with it.
The "Iowa" did almost go down at the worst possible time.
While f.
D.
R.
Was on board, he asked for a weapons demonstration.
As the "Iowa" fired off the big guns, they got word that another ship in the convoy had joined in, but had accidentally fired a live torpedo.
And it was headed directly towards the "Iowa.
" The command crew had seconds to take evasive action.
As the Iowa accelerated, its wake detonated the torpedo before it could hit.
The quick response saved the ship and the president, who led us to victory in world war ii.
So here is the, uh I imagine, the captain's chair.
Look at that logo.
An American eagle, huh? Look at this.
What's this? "Soviet supplementary signals for naval vessels.
" This is a key to, I guess, communication signals for Soviet union vessels, reminding us that this is not just a world war ii vessel we're on here.
This is also cold war.
There must be countless relics like this on board the "Iowa" and on the other ships in this ghost fleet.
They're connections to the past, when the Navy was a huge part of this city.
They'll all be gone in the next five years, but they leave an amazing legacy behind.
Let's go.
I'm following in the footsteps of l.
Ron Hubbard.
Wow, look at that building, huh? Look at this.
Man, talk about a grand interior.
This is the history that gets forgotten.
San Francisco has always drawn free thinkers, from the hippies of the '60s and '70s to today's high-tech computer engineers.
It's a place where a new idea can take root, but some of those ideas are more controversial than others, like l.
Ron Hubbard's 20th century religion scientology.
I'm headed east across the bay to the Oakland hills and the abandoned oak knoll naval hospital, where l.
Ron Hubbard found inspiration for a new religion.
Back there is an officers club from the 1920s, and this whole site here is the, uh the old hospital where l.
Ron Hubbard was.
And it looks pretty pretty empty.
Whatever you think of scientology or its founder, lieutenant Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, it's a big deal, operating in 165 countries and making headlines, thanks to its high-profile celebrity members.
So I'm over here waiting for this guy.
He's supposed to come any second now.
The officers clubhouse is the only building left from the original hospital facility where Hubbard was a patient.
And I've arranged to meet an urban explorer named jon haeber, who knows how to get inside.
- Good morning.
- Morning.
So you're saying that up in this direction here is the hospital where l.
Ron Hubbard was for most of world war ii.
Currently there are only two buildings - that are really left over from that era that exist.
- All right.
The one is the officers club, and the other is the 8-story hospital building that was built around 1963.
The fun part of dis discovering these things is that you always have a new perspective on things when you look at these things from the inside.
Which is the point, right? All right, let's go.
What are we looking for exactly? We're gonna see the club knoll, which is surrounded by a high wall.
So give me the lay of the land here.
What are we going for? All right, so up at the top of that hill right there - is the officers club.
- Okay.
L.
Ron Hubbard was brought to this site, to this hospital.
Yeah, this is where it all started.
This is where he got his ideas.
As a lieutenant, Hubbard was entitled to mingle with high-ranking officers and doctors in this clubhouse.
Wow, look at that building, huh? This is where the officers spent their r & r time.
It was built about 1924.
So if you want to get a sense of what oak knoll really was, this is the place to look.
Usually this door isn't open, but it looks like it is.
Oh, cool.
- So we're inside.
- Yeah, there we go.
Look at this.
Wow.
Man, talk about a grand interior.
This place is epic.
Look at this this fireplace and the rafters in here.
I mean, the bones are all here of this incredible piece of grandeur from the 1920s.
In 1942,the Navy converted the oak knoll country club into a military hospital to deal with thousands of wounded soldiers who were flooding San Francisco from the pacific theater.
Whew, it's kind of spooky, isn't it? World war ii, Vietnam, Korea it's amazing to think about the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who came here to get back on their feet, including l.
Ron Hubbard.
The exact nature of his illness and what he did here is unclear to this day.
He said he had access to patients Um, and he was able to notice the effect of the mind on recovery.
And that that those are the roots of his theories.
While he was recuperating here, Hubbard claimed that he used the time to experiment on other injured servicemen, testing his theory that the mind can heal the body.
Five years later, Hubbard went public with those theories when he published the book "dianetics," which contains the basic tenets of scientology.
No matter which way you look at this, which side you believe, this man, Hubbard, comes in here very much down on his luck I mean, injured in whatever fashion and, uh, his life is not going very well.
He leaves in a whole different frame of mind.
He leaves, uh, founding a new religion, basically.
That's amazing.
After the Navy, l.
Ron set up shop in L.
A.
,and scientology took off.
It can all be traced back here to oak knoll.
So up these stairs is all the way to the tower.
Oh, very nice.
Man, what a view.
So, wow, you can really see how vast this place is.
This is, like, a major piece of real estate.
So I can see a 1960s hospital over there, right? Just the edge of that building that's the naval hospital.
So that's all new.
Everything on here is new except for this.
This is the only building that's really dates back to when l.
Ron Hubbard was here.
Okay.
Though a world religion has its roots in this building, the structure may not survive much longer.
Oh, well, this is one funky space, yeah? Bad smell, big mess.
But you can see, it's like it's a bar.
Yeah, and this is more of a dance club, social area.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I can almost see the disco ball.
This is the history that gets forgotten, right? I mean, they're not making a museum out of this.
Yeah, and the space is more more of a fingerprint for what the people did here.
This is cool.
L.
Ron Hubbard is just one of thousands who passed through oak knoll.
If this building disappears, a vital part of their stories will be erased.
This is an imposing building, isn't it? What went on at this top-secret p.
O.
W.
Interrogation site? And they have no idea what's gonna happen to 'em.
Ever since the '60s, San Francisco has been synonymous with peace and love.
This is haight-ashbury, famous heart of America's counterculture movement, scene of many an antiwar protest and the 1967 summer of love.
But just 25 years before the hippies invaded, this was a very different place.
When pearl harbor was attacked, San Francisco went on high alert.
It was now on the front lines of a world war.
Fear and paranoia gripped the city.
And the large Japanese population here was shipped off to internment camps or put under surveillance.
And that was what they did to U.
S.
citizens.
For captured p.
O.
W.
S, the U.
S.
opened top-secret prisons, or "black sites," to conduct interrogations.
Located east of the city, Byron hot Springs is an abandoned hotel that was converted into one of those highly classified operations.
All right, so this is the place, I think, although in this fog I can't see a thing.
- Carol? - Good morning.
I'm meeting up with local historian Carol jenson to learn about the hotel's secret double life.
Put something right here.
There we go.
The hotel is the only building on 160 acres of land.
There's definitely something sinister about choosing such an isolated location for a wartime interrogation center.
Whew, this is an imposing edifice of a building, isn't it? Absolutely.
This had been a hotel since the turn of the century, but when war broke out in her backyard, patriotic owner mae mead leased it to the military for $200 a year.
Barbed wire went up.
The windows were blacked out.
And it became the top-secret interrogation center "camp Tracy.
" Whew, it is a bit of a devastation.
" This is the lobby entrance to the hotel.
The Japanese prisoners of war would have come in some other way.
Absolutely.
- In fact, I'll show you where they would have arrived.
- All right.
As you look out, you can see there's a road through these palm trees.
Literally, a school bus would have been brought in a school bus with blacked-out windows, so that the prisoners of war did not know where they were going.
Under guard, the prisoners were marched into the hotel through a small back door.
In the pacific imagine, you've been bombed.
You're in a lifeboat.
You've been sitting out there in the pacific for a few days.
You get fished out.
Next thing you know, you're here? And they have no idea what's gonna happen to 'em.
Absolutely.
They are greeted by civilian-clothed American Japanese.
Japanese Americans known as nisei were recruited by the U.
S.
as translators.
And these were the people who welcomed the p.
O.
W.
S.
They arrive here expecting one thing monstrous Americans who are gonna torture and maim them, and they get quite the opposite.
Interrogations were more like conversations conducted by the nisei.
And they were held on the second floor of this former resort hotel.
So they gave 'em good food, Japanese food.
They put 'em in a nice place, a clean place.
This person is being well-treated, kindly, fairly, met with,"hey, what's your name? Where you from?" Kind of thing.
After a meal and interrogation, the men were shown to their rooms.
If the five-star treatment got them to lower their guard, that's exactly what the U.
S.
military wanted.
So as we walk in, if you'll notice to our left, - this would have been the commode.
- Sure.
And notice there's a hole in this wall, and there's a hole in the adjoining wall.
It's put in there specially with a grill, because it's bugged.
So this let me just get it straight.
I have this moment that I can actually talk to my fellow prisoner over there, "psst, hey.
" You know,"what's going on here?" You know,"where are you from? What was your unit?" Blah, blah, blah, and get this information.
Little do they know that there's actually a bug in this vent - Absolutely.
- Which is the whole point of the vent.
Exactly.
We're talking microphones everywhere light fixtures, ventilation shafts bugged, bugged, bugged.
Wires from the bugs ran down the elevator shaft to a listening post in the basement.
They would be coming in literally right here.
And this was the silent room.
This is where all the recording was done and the transcription was done.
So this is the really secret room down here.
This is the secret of the secret rooms.
The northeast corner of the ground floor was filled with listening stations and transcribers.
They took down every word spoken on the third floor where the prisoners were held and in the second floor interrogation rooms.
So these acoustic tiles are all over the place, and they were yeah, there you go.
So these were up on everything.
- This is essentially a sound studio.
- Exactly.
And this whole room would've been full of clerks Using manual typewriters typing up the transcriptions.
Which is why they had to, I guess, seal it off for sound from people hearing it out there.
Click, click, click, click, click.
What did they find out in here? They found out some incredible information here at camp Tracy what ships the Japanese Navy had, the size of the ships What ships were the command ships.
So much of it was so important in winning the war in the pacific.
There were 3,500 prisoners in camp Tracy, 12,000 interrogations, priceless intelligence gathered, and no accounts of torturing Japanese prisoners.
I don't think this operation is as successful as it is anywhere else in the country, right? There's a huge Japanese American population here in northern California, in San Francisco, so there's a cultural familiarity that sort of paves the way for the success of this.
Bring Japanese prisoners of war to this place, serve them their own food, speak their language, sort of soften them up with kindness instead of force.
Maybe that was the most valuable thing they learned at camp Tracy, that you can win a war without losing your humanity.
Whoa, this is an awesome thing to look at.
I'm exploring a working man's cathedral on its last legs.
Oh, it gets kind of gooey up here, careful.
San Francisco is one of the most desirable and priciest places to live in the U.
S.
Walking down the city streets today, you'd never suspect that this used to be a tough blue-collar town.
So I'm walking here in what is really San Francisco's most up-and-coming area.
It's right down the street from the new ballpark.
But trust me, at the turn of the last century, this would not be where you walked at night.
It was the seediest of waterfronts, one filthy shipyard after the next.
Some of the last traces of the city's blue-collar roots are on the southeast side of town, an area called pier 70.
Berkeley Professor Paul groth knows the story of tough immigrants, the backbone of a shipbuilding industry that made San Francisco what it is today.
- This was the edge of town of San Francisco, yeah? - Right, right.
Rough-and-tumble area.
- Yes, on this side, it was called Irish hill - Irish hill.
- A neighborhood with 50% Irish - Okay.
Single guys, women running saloons, and this was a neighborhood known for it's prizefights - Oh, really? - And also a lot of other fights.
Yeah, exactly.
A workday what does this look like on this road? Well, you have to imagine, and especially a work peak, like, during the wars 5,000 people coming first thing in the morning - Okay.
- You know, they all have to be here at once And at 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, - 5000 people leaving, you know? - Wow.
They were employed by union iron works, a company built by Irish immigrant Peter donahue.
He set up a small blacksmithing shop near the bay during the gold rush, and over the next few decades, he built what would become the biggest shipyard on the west coast.
But today, these abandoned buildings shelter addicts and looters, and we aren't allowed in without a port police escort.
Obviously, it's an unsafe area.
This is a huge site, right? And these buildings are all at different points with different access points, so officer Perry's been kind enough to take us around and get us in these places.
Looking around now, it's hard to believe it, but in the 1880s, this was a cutting-edge industrial complex.
There were seven buildings that functioned like one giant factory, but instead of assembling cars, they were making massive steel-hulled ships.
At the heart of the operation was building 113, the machine shop.
Whoa.
This is an awesome thing to look at, isn't it? You feel like you're in some kind of spiritual space, right? Well, it's 500 feet long.
It's as long as a lot of cathedrals in Europe.
- A cathedral to industry.
- Yeah, exactly.
Between the 1880s and 1940s, they built hundreds of ships here including the U.
S.
Navy's great white fleet.
They're moving huge objects around here.
Right.
And then these big cranes I guess we should be putting this on.
At its peak, there were 16,000 men working at pier 70, three shifts a day.
And the v.
I.
P.
S of the factory floor were the skilled metalworkers, the machinists.
These machinists, who could make things out of machines, they were like the computer programmers of the 1880s.
Everybody wanted them.
If they weren't treated right, they would walk down the street and get a job in another machine shop.
This was a high-tech space at the turn of the century laid out for maximum efficiency.
The machinists constructed the smaller parts in bays lining the walls.
So how many guys are constituting these teams? Probably about ten ten machinists per bay here And then two or three people bringing them materials and stuff, oil spewing, lots of noise, grinding metal noises.
After the teams of workers finished building the smaller parts, those pieces were moved to the center of the shop and assembled into giant ship engines and 3-story boilers using the massive overhead cranes.
And what of the reasons this is so tall and so long is that they're using overhead cranes.
- So at the time, this was cutting-edge technology.
- Absolutely.
When this shop was built, this was absolutely state-of-the-art.
It's hard to imagine these rusting giants in action.
To get a sense of just how vast this operation was, you need a bird's-eye view of the whole thing.
We gotta go up here.
I gotta see if we can get up onto this crane.
It gets kind of gooey up here, careful.
A lot of animal up here and everything.
We gotta get up here and look at this thing to get, you know, a perspective on how vast this space really is and what it took to run it.
I don't know if this is gonna hold me.
It feels a little shaky.
But let's see.
Look, look, look at that.
So this is the crane.
Can I scoot around here? Here, let's see.
All right, look at this thing.
I mean, it's one thing to see it from down below, but up here, you not only see here, I'm gonna squeeze here you not only see how massive this work is, but think of the guys who were building this stuff, these teams of workers, thousands and thousands of workers.
This is typical of industry at its proudest, right? American industry when it really built things, when it developed it and innovated it, and we weren't kidding around.
After world war ii, bay area shipbuilding declined.
By the 1960s, it was done.
The crumbling ruins of pier 70 are some of the only monuments to the tough men and women who built this city.
But there is a movement to save these buildings and transform pier 70 into a combination of clean-tech businesses and park land.
San Francisco has evolved over the years from murderous boomtown to idyllic urban playground.
The places from its past may not be pretty, but the stories they tell are this city's roots.
It can't keep growing without them.
I surrender.
Welcome to San Francisco, where you have to break a few rules to see the real city a brutal 150-year-old dungeon.
This is four people living in this tiny, little cell.
A ghost ship where a president almost died And if this ship goes down, they are going down with it.
And black ops bases.
As far as they know, something really bad is gonna take place.
Take off your tie-dye This is a wild place to work.
And put on a hard hat I guess we should be putting this on.
This is San Francisco "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.
s01e03 I got an e-mail from the San Quentin people.
You cannot wear jeans.
You have to wear khakis.
- Who are you here to see? - John.
If it's raining, you cannot bring in a pointy umbrella.
These are a pair pair of glasses.
"Hostages will not be recognized for bargaining purposes.
" Go ahead and spin around for me.
San Quentin is one of the toughest prisons in the world.
Getting in isn't easy.
But there's something amazing behind these walls the brutal 150-year-old dungeon that helped make a great city possible San Francisco.
The bay area is beautiful and romantic, home of free love and fine living.
It's a progressive melting pot of old-school hippies and 21st-century computer geeks.
But if you were here 150 years ago, you wouldn't recognize the place.
After the gold rush of 1849, the population exploded, and there was no real law and order.
There were only 35 cops and tens of thousands of drunken, desperate men.
The murder rate soared, and vigilantes lynched suspects at will.
With San Fran in chaos, the brand-new state of California was on the verge of collapse.
The solution was a prison.
Alcatraz was still just a small fort when construction started on the first public building in California San Quentin state prison.
And to control the violent men locked up inside, they built a dungeon.
That's what I'm on my way to see.
Slowly but surely through here, 'cause our camera crew has to get cleared as well, all wanded up and everything.
My escort through the yard is retired guard John gladsen.
Hey, Johnny! He worked at the prison for 27 years.
He's been stabbed and has survived numerous riots.
So John's a former prison guard here, and as we're standing in here he's just retired all of his friends, all of the guards are coming out.
It's like, you know, old home week for him.
Okay, what happens is these doors never open at the same time.
It's called a Sally port.
And this is our last line of stopping any kind of escape is right here.
Okay, now this gate can open.
Now this is the, uh the secure area.
You are now inside of San Quentin proper.
Unbelievable.
Okay, so now we're seeing the population of these guys.
Orange inmates means they just came back to prison, - or they're first-termers.
- Okay.
Yeah, you always try to start reading the fellas, you know? 'Cause with their tattoos the tattoos will tell you a lot.
This is a wild place to work.
How many prisoners are in here - Uh, about - Generally speaking? - Around 5,000.
- 5,000 people are in here? San Quentin is home to gangs like the Aryan brotherhood and serial killer Richard "the night stalker" Ramirez, who murdered 13 people in their homes.
This has been a violent place for over 150 years, for both prisoners and guards.
This over here is all the prison guards that were murdered.
Sergeant hal burchfield we put his marker up here.
And I was here when he got murdered.
A guy took a spear and speared out and caught him in the, uh in the heart.
You know, he went really quick.
Today the most violent and dangerous criminals are put here the adjustment center.
This is where 675 men sit on death row.
Back in the 1800s, troublemakers ended up here, a horrific punishment cell block known as "the dungeon.
" And this is the entrance to the dungeon.
" And this is the original obviously the original building of this.
Right.
The building was nearly knocked down a few years ago, until old records revealed its dark historical significance.
Wow.
So this is the original San Quentin.
Oh, yeah, here you go.
I mean, this is the first prison in California.
Whew.
This is the last remaining structure from the original prison.
This is a grim place.
It is.
It is.
Oh, boy.
All right, so this is not big.
There are only how many cells in here? 14 cells.
All right, so this is a single cell.
No, this was four people.
Oh, this is four people living in this tiny, little cell.
- It's - Yeah.
And no toilet facilities they used to give 'em a bucket.
Really? Food was was like, you know, uh, - full of maggots and stuff like that - Just really bad.
Just gruel, yeah.
- This would have been a solid steel door out here - Okay.
Coming down.
It would have had a slot cut out of the bottom right here with another little door on it - Okay.
- So that they could push in the food.
All right.
Is there any kind of slit through No light.
No light.
No light, no ventilation.
Time in the dungeon was the penalty for bad behavior in the main prison.
And the guards made sure it was hellish in here.
And would they have some kind of bedding, I guess, in here? Uh, no.
No.
- No bedding? - No bedding.
In order to keep the guys off the floor, they would, uh they would water the floor down so that the guys couldn't, uh couldn't sit down.
You know, so anything just to make life miserable.
Wow.
So this was the ultimate punishment that the guards had over those prisoners.
If you did something to a guard up on the yard, he would walk you down here and put you in the dungeon.
And he was the only one who could get you out of the dungeon.
Really? Okay.
So you sure hoped he didn't go off for a few days.
The dungeon was the ultimate threat.
But there were other horrors, like back-breaking labor.
I mean, back then this was also kind of an industry, wasn't it? Oh, this was straight-up slave labor.
California governor John a.
Mcdougal was one of the first to cash in on convict labor.
A failed gold miner and businessman, mcdougal finally succeeded when he set up a system for leasing out the prisoners as unpaid workers.
They would call over to the the sheriff of San Francisco and say, "hey, we need people that know how to do lay brick you know, bricklayers.
" - So they'd go out and arrest bricklayers.
- They'd arrest them.
No way.
If anyone complained, they could probably expect to end up here in the dungeon, getting special treatment.
Now up here are those little hooks that they would, uh oh, yeah.
You know, you could hang a guy off of, you know, by putting the chain up there.
And each one of these would be for basically holding a prisoner while you were maybe getting cleaning out a cell or something? Yeah, getting his attention.
The men were flogged or tied up and sprayed with hoses and early version of waterboarding.
I mean, I would never want to go back to a thing like this, where, you know, it was actually mistreatment.
In the 1940s, abuse was finally banned, and the dungeon was shut down then converted into storage.
It was a horrific torture chamber, but there's no question it got results.
Ten years after it opened, the murder rate in San Francisco was cut in half.
And buildings other than saloons and brothels started going up.
You're inside here in the late 1800s, just after the gold rush in San Francisco, a time of incredible prosperity but also incredible chaos, all right? Out of that prosperity comes a lot of criminals that need to be dealt with really crazy town then.
They build this place to deal with that problem.
Today San Quentin is one of the last surviving witnesses to the city's tough beginnings and evidence that building a beautiful city can be an ugly business.
It's big.
Prepare to be blown away by a battleship in the bay.
- Look at these guns.
- Unbelievable.
And The spot where scientology began.
Whew, it's kinda spooky, isn't it? San Francisco bay is a magnet for tourists.
They visit Alcatraz, sail under the golden gate bridge, or hop a ferry for sausalito.
Nearby but off the radar, there are other unbelievable sights with amazing stories.
They're hard to find, even harder to get into.
I'm heading to one of the most remarkable of these hidden treasures.
Just north of the city is an entire fleet of Navy ghost ships, most of them destined for the scrap heap.
Oh, man, this is an awesome sight, right? I'm looking out at suisun bay here at these ghostly apparitions of a fleet of U.
S.
naval ships.
We're going to the "u.
S.
S.
Iowa," which is a huge ship right out there.
The "u.
S.
S.
Iowa" launched in 1943, and after five decades of warfare, there are incredible stories on board, including a friendly fire incident that nearly killed f.
D.
R.
And top-secret military tech that gave birth to silicon valley.
But its days here in the bay could be numbered.
Hey, John.
- Great to meet you.
- Likewise.
U.
S.
Naval expert John garvey is my guide.
This is an active military facility, and you need special clearance from the U.
S.
Navy to get on board.
- So get ready.
- Okay.
- Government property.
- Can I have all your ids, please? - Hello and good morning.
Yes.
- Good morning.
Uh, I'd like to take a few minutes to discuss some of - the safety concerns that we have - Okay.
- Especially on the "Iowa.
" - Yeah.
I gotta wear this the whole day? You wear it the whole day.
Uh, trust me.
There's places on the vessel you may hit your head, and it does hurt.
Okay.
The ships are moored about 1/2 mile out in the bay.
So I have to hop a ride on a small transport boat.
All right.
I'm cold today.
It's cold.
It's incredible, isn't it? It really is incredible.
I mean, you don't expect it to have the emotional impact that it does, being I mean, first of all, they're just awesomely sized.
They're big objects in the water.
But also you get a sense, a distinct sense of the history of of, I mean, a century of warfare.
There are 53 ships anchored here today.
At 1 time there were 500.
But within five years, they'll all be gone scrapped or towed away.
This historic relics are incredibly toxic and are poisoning the bay with asbestos and lead.
So that sign says "restricted area.
Keep off 500 feet.
" Those signs are posted all over the place.
If you're out here fishing in these waters, uh, and you come anywhere close, they know you're here, and there's patrols around these ships.
Oh, there it is.
Look at that baby, man the "u.
S.
S.
Iowa.
" I remember when I was a kid, and I used to build little models, you know, and I built the "u.
S.
S.
New Jersey," which was an "Iowa"-class ship, just like this one.
I actually recognize this.
The "Iowa" is three football fields long and towers 15 stories high.
It's the largest, fastest, most powerful battleship ever built by the U.
S.
Yeah, what's most impressive is these three, uh, turrets.
Right.
The 9 16-inch guns They're very, very powerful.
It's big.
This is awesome.
This is the very same ladder that thousands of sailors climbed heading off to war in the pacific, Korea, and Vietnam.
I'm getting to see what they saw as they came aboard.
She is beautiful.
Look at this.
It is so enormous, right? - It's a floating fortress.
- Yeah.
Yeah.
The "Iowa's" fate is uncertain.
I may be one of the last people ever to freely explore the ship.
Look at these guns.
Unbelievable.
Insane thing.
Wow.
I give up.
I surrender.
I mean, look at this.
This is the distinguishing feature, most obviously the 16-inch guns.
They've got this barrel covered up here.
And it can shoot it shoots a 2,700-pound shell More than 20 Miles with incredible accuracy.
Each one of these there's three separate guns here, and then there's two turrets.
That is some sight to see, isn't it? The massive guns are impressive, but they'd be useless without the fire controls and technology found below deck.
And that's what I want to see.
Okay.
- In we go, huh? - Okay, there you go.
The tech that ran this ship is the product of military r & d money and brilliant engineers, the same combo that built silicon valley.
Don, we're heading down towards Broadway.
We're heading deep into the ship, to the main passage known as "Broadway.
" Look how long this hallway is.
Unbelievable.
And all of this is basically running this ship, right? This is the mechanical working.
- This is all computers.
- Yes.
This is the internal communications unit, where the computerized gunnery controls are located.
I mean, it's very complicated machinery even now to my eye.
This was this is representative of what kind of technology comes along with the military, and therefore was here in San Francisco.
They they had to have a lot of brainpower here.
This equipment was upgraded in the '70s and '80s, 40 years after the first partnership between military money and bay area brilliance.
One of the "Iowa's" first upgrades in 1944 was an electronic radar jamming system.
It's development was supervised by bay area Professor Frederick terman.
After the war, he taught at Stanford university and brought big bucks for military research with him.
Stanford produced computer pioneers, including the founders of hp hewlett and packard.
During the cold war, ships like the "Iowa" got high-tech upgrades, and silicon valley kept growing.
Today businesses like intel, teledyne, and apple make San Francisco the hub of the high-tech universe.
It is pretty, uh, exciting to be around so much equipment that within my lifetime would have been highly classified, right? I would've never gotten this close to, ou know, what is really the root of what now we're so used to, okay? The very technology that is behind the laptops, the smartphones, the software we take for granted now, you can find right here in the belly of a battleship.
I've seen the tangible, physical links between the military and silicon valley, but there are a lot more stories to find on board the "Iowa.
" You know, they're giving the orders right here.
The president comes under fire, and the "Iowa's" crew has seconds to save him.
Going to battle stations.
YTET- ÃóÃó San Francisco is just over 160 years old, but crucial phases of its history, like its military past, are already fading from memory.
I'm just north of the city, exploring the decommissioned battleship "u.
S.
S.
Iowa.
" And that's a floor below.
I guess we're down towards the bottom of the ship here.
I've seen how battle tech launched silicon valley.
And now military expert John garvey is gonna show me how the ship was the world war ii era prototype.
For air force one.
Here we go.
So this is the presidential suite in here.
Yes.
Look at that - Wow, look at this sweet room here.
- Some, uh some space.
I'll take it.
In 1943,f.
D.
R.
Needed to get to tehran to meet with allied leaders Churchill and Stalin their first face-to-face strategy session of the war.
That meant a treacherous 3,000-mile journey through enemy waters.
It was basically secret.
It was similar to president Obama landing in Afghanistan unannounced.
Right.
So if you're gonna ship a president to a secret conference, you do it on this boat here.
On the "Iowa," f.
D.
R.
Had the ultimate shipboard luxury elbow room and So this is the only bathtub in the whole U.
S.
Navy.
I'm standing right next to where Franklin Roosevelt essentially was sitting on his way to basically planning the victory of world war ii.
That's incredible.
Look over here.
You wonder what you know, what communications went out on this phone.
Oh, look, it's his razor.
The commander in chief slept here, but all orders on the "Iowa" came from one place the bridge.
That's where I'm heading next.
But getting through this maze of tiny passageways won't be easy.
Okay, watch your head.
Excuse me.
- Nice.
- Yes.
It's called the big stick.
Controls here.
Laugh and learn.
The ship is so massive, it's easy to imagine getting lost down here Zone four.
For days.
Don, we're going to the battle station over here.
Going to battle stations.
Look at that.
Look at this.
Man, when they went to battle stations, they meant business, right? So in event of battle, you know, actual attack, they are coming into this this room here.
I mean, just oh, look at this.
That is amazing.
This is the battle bridge.
This is the citadel, right? Look at this.
These are I mean, what is that? 18-inch-thick steel.
And you gotta get a sense of this thing, all right? Come around here.
So you see this is a whole circular container, basically of steel.
When the ship was cruising, the commanding officer's station was here on the bridge.
When the battle stations alarm sounded, the C.
O.
climbed into the battle bridge.
Okay, so those two doors, one on either side, get sealed off, you know, majorly craned off.
You are inside this thing till the bitter end.
Each one of these there's two of these are the periscopes, okay? That's actually seeing out to the battle.
Look, you're you know, they're giving the orders right here, uh, through the squawk box, down communicating with the gunners, with the engine room.
And if this ship goes down, they are going down with it.
The "Iowa" did almost go down at the worst possible time.
While f.
D.
R.
Was on board, he asked for a weapons demonstration.
As the "Iowa" fired off the big guns, they got word that another ship in the convoy had joined in, but had accidentally fired a live torpedo.
And it was headed directly towards the "Iowa.
" The command crew had seconds to take evasive action.
As the Iowa accelerated, its wake detonated the torpedo before it could hit.
The quick response saved the ship and the president, who led us to victory in world war ii.
So here is the, uh I imagine, the captain's chair.
Look at that logo.
An American eagle, huh? Look at this.
What's this? "Soviet supplementary signals for naval vessels.
" This is a key to, I guess, communication signals for Soviet union vessels, reminding us that this is not just a world war ii vessel we're on here.
This is also cold war.
There must be countless relics like this on board the "Iowa" and on the other ships in this ghost fleet.
They're connections to the past, when the Navy was a huge part of this city.
They'll all be gone in the next five years, but they leave an amazing legacy behind.
Let's go.
I'm following in the footsteps of l.
Ron Hubbard.
Wow, look at that building, huh? Look at this.
Man, talk about a grand interior.
This is the history that gets forgotten.
San Francisco has always drawn free thinkers, from the hippies of the '60s and '70s to today's high-tech computer engineers.
It's a place where a new idea can take root, but some of those ideas are more controversial than others, like l.
Ron Hubbard's 20th century religion scientology.
I'm headed east across the bay to the Oakland hills and the abandoned oak knoll naval hospital, where l.
Ron Hubbard found inspiration for a new religion.
Back there is an officers club from the 1920s, and this whole site here is the, uh the old hospital where l.
Ron Hubbard was.
And it looks pretty pretty empty.
Whatever you think of scientology or its founder, lieutenant Lafayette Ronald Hubbard, it's a big deal, operating in 165 countries and making headlines, thanks to its high-profile celebrity members.
So I'm over here waiting for this guy.
He's supposed to come any second now.
The officers clubhouse is the only building left from the original hospital facility where Hubbard was a patient.
And I've arranged to meet an urban explorer named jon haeber, who knows how to get inside.
- Good morning.
- Morning.
So you're saying that up in this direction here is the hospital where l.
Ron Hubbard was for most of world war ii.
Currently there are only two buildings - that are really left over from that era that exist.
- All right.
The one is the officers club, and the other is the 8-story hospital building that was built around 1963.
The fun part of dis discovering these things is that you always have a new perspective on things when you look at these things from the inside.
Which is the point, right? All right, let's go.
What are we looking for exactly? We're gonna see the club knoll, which is surrounded by a high wall.
So give me the lay of the land here.
What are we going for? All right, so up at the top of that hill right there - is the officers club.
- Okay.
L.
Ron Hubbard was brought to this site, to this hospital.
Yeah, this is where it all started.
This is where he got his ideas.
As a lieutenant, Hubbard was entitled to mingle with high-ranking officers and doctors in this clubhouse.
Wow, look at that building, huh? This is where the officers spent their r & r time.
It was built about 1924.
So if you want to get a sense of what oak knoll really was, this is the place to look.
Usually this door isn't open, but it looks like it is.
Oh, cool.
- So we're inside.
- Yeah, there we go.
Look at this.
Wow.
Man, talk about a grand interior.
This place is epic.
Look at this this fireplace and the rafters in here.
I mean, the bones are all here of this incredible piece of grandeur from the 1920s.
In 1942,the Navy converted the oak knoll country club into a military hospital to deal with thousands of wounded soldiers who were flooding San Francisco from the pacific theater.
Whew, it's kind of spooky, isn't it? World war ii, Vietnam, Korea it's amazing to think about the hundreds of thousands of servicemen who came here to get back on their feet, including l.
Ron Hubbard.
The exact nature of his illness and what he did here is unclear to this day.
He said he had access to patients Um, and he was able to notice the effect of the mind on recovery.
And that that those are the roots of his theories.
While he was recuperating here, Hubbard claimed that he used the time to experiment on other injured servicemen, testing his theory that the mind can heal the body.
Five years later, Hubbard went public with those theories when he published the book "dianetics," which contains the basic tenets of scientology.
No matter which way you look at this, which side you believe, this man, Hubbard, comes in here very much down on his luck I mean, injured in whatever fashion and, uh, his life is not going very well.
He leaves in a whole different frame of mind.
He leaves, uh, founding a new religion, basically.
That's amazing.
After the Navy, l.
Ron set up shop in L.
A.
,and scientology took off.
It can all be traced back here to oak knoll.
So up these stairs is all the way to the tower.
Oh, very nice.
Man, what a view.
So, wow, you can really see how vast this place is.
This is, like, a major piece of real estate.
So I can see a 1960s hospital over there, right? Just the edge of that building that's the naval hospital.
So that's all new.
Everything on here is new except for this.
This is the only building that's really dates back to when l.
Ron Hubbard was here.
Okay.
Though a world religion has its roots in this building, the structure may not survive much longer.
Oh, well, this is one funky space, yeah? Bad smell, big mess.
But you can see, it's like it's a bar.
Yeah, and this is more of a dance club, social area.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I can almost see the disco ball.
This is the history that gets forgotten, right? I mean, they're not making a museum out of this.
Yeah, and the space is more more of a fingerprint for what the people did here.
This is cool.
L.
Ron Hubbard is just one of thousands who passed through oak knoll.
If this building disappears, a vital part of their stories will be erased.
This is an imposing building, isn't it? What went on at this top-secret p.
O.
W.
Interrogation site? And they have no idea what's gonna happen to 'em.
Ever since the '60s, San Francisco has been synonymous with peace and love.
This is haight-ashbury, famous heart of America's counterculture movement, scene of many an antiwar protest and the 1967 summer of love.
But just 25 years before the hippies invaded, this was a very different place.
When pearl harbor was attacked, San Francisco went on high alert.
It was now on the front lines of a world war.
Fear and paranoia gripped the city.
And the large Japanese population here was shipped off to internment camps or put under surveillance.
And that was what they did to U.
S.
citizens.
For captured p.
O.
W.
S, the U.
S.
opened top-secret prisons, or "black sites," to conduct interrogations.
Located east of the city, Byron hot Springs is an abandoned hotel that was converted into one of those highly classified operations.
All right, so this is the place, I think, although in this fog I can't see a thing.
- Carol? - Good morning.
I'm meeting up with local historian Carol jenson to learn about the hotel's secret double life.
Put something right here.
There we go.
The hotel is the only building on 160 acres of land.
There's definitely something sinister about choosing such an isolated location for a wartime interrogation center.
Whew, this is an imposing edifice of a building, isn't it? Absolutely.
This had been a hotel since the turn of the century, but when war broke out in her backyard, patriotic owner mae mead leased it to the military for $200 a year.
Barbed wire went up.
The windows were blacked out.
And it became the top-secret interrogation center "camp Tracy.
" Whew, it is a bit of a devastation.
" This is the lobby entrance to the hotel.
The Japanese prisoners of war would have come in some other way.
Absolutely.
- In fact, I'll show you where they would have arrived.
- All right.
As you look out, you can see there's a road through these palm trees.
Literally, a school bus would have been brought in a school bus with blacked-out windows, so that the prisoners of war did not know where they were going.
Under guard, the prisoners were marched into the hotel through a small back door.
In the pacific imagine, you've been bombed.
You're in a lifeboat.
You've been sitting out there in the pacific for a few days.
You get fished out.
Next thing you know, you're here? And they have no idea what's gonna happen to 'em.
Absolutely.
They are greeted by civilian-clothed American Japanese.
Japanese Americans known as nisei were recruited by the U.
S.
as translators.
And these were the people who welcomed the p.
O.
W.
S.
They arrive here expecting one thing monstrous Americans who are gonna torture and maim them, and they get quite the opposite.
Interrogations were more like conversations conducted by the nisei.
And they were held on the second floor of this former resort hotel.
So they gave 'em good food, Japanese food.
They put 'em in a nice place, a clean place.
This person is being well-treated, kindly, fairly, met with,"hey, what's your name? Where you from?" Kind of thing.
After a meal and interrogation, the men were shown to their rooms.
If the five-star treatment got them to lower their guard, that's exactly what the U.
S.
military wanted.
So as we walk in, if you'll notice to our left, - this would have been the commode.
- Sure.
And notice there's a hole in this wall, and there's a hole in the adjoining wall.
It's put in there specially with a grill, because it's bugged.
So this let me just get it straight.
I have this moment that I can actually talk to my fellow prisoner over there, "psst, hey.
" You know,"what's going on here?" You know,"where are you from? What was your unit?" Blah, blah, blah, and get this information.
Little do they know that there's actually a bug in this vent - Absolutely.
- Which is the whole point of the vent.
Exactly.
We're talking microphones everywhere light fixtures, ventilation shafts bugged, bugged, bugged.
Wires from the bugs ran down the elevator shaft to a listening post in the basement.
They would be coming in literally right here.
And this was the silent room.
This is where all the recording was done and the transcription was done.
So this is the really secret room down here.
This is the secret of the secret rooms.
The northeast corner of the ground floor was filled with listening stations and transcribers.
They took down every word spoken on the third floor where the prisoners were held and in the second floor interrogation rooms.
So these acoustic tiles are all over the place, and they were yeah, there you go.
So these were up on everything.
- This is essentially a sound studio.
- Exactly.
And this whole room would've been full of clerks Using manual typewriters typing up the transcriptions.
Which is why they had to, I guess, seal it off for sound from people hearing it out there.
Click, click, click, click, click.
What did they find out in here? They found out some incredible information here at camp Tracy what ships the Japanese Navy had, the size of the ships What ships were the command ships.
So much of it was so important in winning the war in the pacific.
There were 3,500 prisoners in camp Tracy, 12,000 interrogations, priceless intelligence gathered, and no accounts of torturing Japanese prisoners.
I don't think this operation is as successful as it is anywhere else in the country, right? There's a huge Japanese American population here in northern California, in San Francisco, so there's a cultural familiarity that sort of paves the way for the success of this.
Bring Japanese prisoners of war to this place, serve them their own food, speak their language, sort of soften them up with kindness instead of force.
Maybe that was the most valuable thing they learned at camp Tracy, that you can win a war without losing your humanity.
Whoa, this is an awesome thing to look at.
I'm exploring a working man's cathedral on its last legs.
Oh, it gets kind of gooey up here, careful.
San Francisco is one of the most desirable and priciest places to live in the U.
S.
Walking down the city streets today, you'd never suspect that this used to be a tough blue-collar town.
So I'm walking here in what is really San Francisco's most up-and-coming area.
It's right down the street from the new ballpark.
But trust me, at the turn of the last century, this would not be where you walked at night.
It was the seediest of waterfronts, one filthy shipyard after the next.
Some of the last traces of the city's blue-collar roots are on the southeast side of town, an area called pier 70.
Berkeley Professor Paul groth knows the story of tough immigrants, the backbone of a shipbuilding industry that made San Francisco what it is today.
- This was the edge of town of San Francisco, yeah? - Right, right.
Rough-and-tumble area.
- Yes, on this side, it was called Irish hill - Irish hill.
- A neighborhood with 50% Irish - Okay.
Single guys, women running saloons, and this was a neighborhood known for it's prizefights - Oh, really? - And also a lot of other fights.
Yeah, exactly.
A workday what does this look like on this road? Well, you have to imagine, and especially a work peak, like, during the wars 5,000 people coming first thing in the morning - Okay.
- You know, they all have to be here at once And at 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, - 5000 people leaving, you know? - Wow.
They were employed by union iron works, a company built by Irish immigrant Peter donahue.
He set up a small blacksmithing shop near the bay during the gold rush, and over the next few decades, he built what would become the biggest shipyard on the west coast.
But today, these abandoned buildings shelter addicts and looters, and we aren't allowed in without a port police escort.
Obviously, it's an unsafe area.
This is a huge site, right? And these buildings are all at different points with different access points, so officer Perry's been kind enough to take us around and get us in these places.
Looking around now, it's hard to believe it, but in the 1880s, this was a cutting-edge industrial complex.
There were seven buildings that functioned like one giant factory, but instead of assembling cars, they were making massive steel-hulled ships.
At the heart of the operation was building 113, the machine shop.
Whoa.
This is an awesome thing to look at, isn't it? You feel like you're in some kind of spiritual space, right? Well, it's 500 feet long.
It's as long as a lot of cathedrals in Europe.
- A cathedral to industry.
- Yeah, exactly.
Between the 1880s and 1940s, they built hundreds of ships here including the U.
S.
Navy's great white fleet.
They're moving huge objects around here.
Right.
And then these big cranes I guess we should be putting this on.
At its peak, there were 16,000 men working at pier 70, three shifts a day.
And the v.
I.
P.
S of the factory floor were the skilled metalworkers, the machinists.
These machinists, who could make things out of machines, they were like the computer programmers of the 1880s.
Everybody wanted them.
If they weren't treated right, they would walk down the street and get a job in another machine shop.
This was a high-tech space at the turn of the century laid out for maximum efficiency.
The machinists constructed the smaller parts in bays lining the walls.
So how many guys are constituting these teams? Probably about ten ten machinists per bay here And then two or three people bringing them materials and stuff, oil spewing, lots of noise, grinding metal noises.
After the teams of workers finished building the smaller parts, those pieces were moved to the center of the shop and assembled into giant ship engines and 3-story boilers using the massive overhead cranes.
And what of the reasons this is so tall and so long is that they're using overhead cranes.
- So at the time, this was cutting-edge technology.
- Absolutely.
When this shop was built, this was absolutely state-of-the-art.
It's hard to imagine these rusting giants in action.
To get a sense of just how vast this operation was, you need a bird's-eye view of the whole thing.
We gotta go up here.
I gotta see if we can get up onto this crane.
It gets kind of gooey up here, careful.
A lot of animal up here and everything.
We gotta get up here and look at this thing to get, you know, a perspective on how vast this space really is and what it took to run it.
I don't know if this is gonna hold me.
It feels a little shaky.
But let's see.
Look, look, look at that.
So this is the crane.
Can I scoot around here? Here, let's see.
All right, look at this thing.
I mean, it's one thing to see it from down below, but up here, you not only see here, I'm gonna squeeze here you not only see how massive this work is, but think of the guys who were building this stuff, these teams of workers, thousands and thousands of workers.
This is typical of industry at its proudest, right? American industry when it really built things, when it developed it and innovated it, and we weren't kidding around.
After world war ii, bay area shipbuilding declined.
By the 1960s, it was done.
The crumbling ruins of pier 70 are some of the only monuments to the tough men and women who built this city.
But there is a movement to save these buildings and transform pier 70 into a combination of clean-tech businesses and park land.
San Francisco has evolved over the years from murderous boomtown to idyllic urban playground.
The places from its past may not be pretty, but the stories they tell are this city's roots.
It can't keep growing without them.