[music playing] DON WILDMAN: San
Francisco, California is full of deadly surprises. We're anticipating
up to a 7.9 earthquake in the next 30 years. DON WILDMAN: From a
former nuclear arsenal-- World War III has just begun. DON WILDMAN: --to the dark
tunnels of a Wild West Underground Railroad. You know, these are tight spaces
for little kids, not for me. We'll discover how the war
between the North and South reached the dungeons
of Alcatraz. I'm in a tunnel
beneath Alcatraz. And for the first time
ever turn our cameras over to extreme urban explorers. We're trying to stay
perfectly quiet. We're in search of adventure
on "Cities of the Underworld: San Francisco, Under the Rock." [music playing] Hey, I'm Don Wildman. I'm in San Francisco,
California, a city perched on the edge of destruction
since the day it was founded. It's known as a Mecca
of hippies, artists, and start up millionaires. But if you dig a
little deeper, you'll find the city has a dark side;
Civil War fortresses, World War II strongholds, and top secret
nuclear missile sites that defended the city for over
a century from invaders. San Francisco, California
is surrounded on three sides by the Pacific. Over the years, its harbor
has been the city's highway to wealth, a deadly threat
and a savage gatekeeper. There's no more infamous prison
in the world than Alcatraz. For decades, it caged America's
most dangerous criminals. But its reputation as an end
of the road maximum security penitentiary is only
part of the story. Beneath the cell block that
housed the likes of Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly are the
brick remains of an old Civil War fortress, one that protected
the Union's vast wealth and defended the Bay
from foreign invaders. Rich?
- Yes. Hey, Don Wildman. Morning, Don, welcome. Morning. I took a boat ride to Alcatraz
with National Park Ranger, Rich Wiedman, to learn how the
rock protected San Francisco from Confederate gunboats. A mile and a quarter from
downtown San Francisco, Alcatraz is a 22 acre
island made of solid stone, an ideal natural prison. The water's 300 feet deep. OK. The water temperature 48
to 52 degrees Fahrenheit. And so if somebody
tries to escape, they can last in the water maybe
20 minutes before hypothermia sets in. 70% of the fish in
the Bay are sharks. So if you died from
the cold water, you drowned, it's likely your
body would have been gotten by the sharks. Nice! Where the hulking,
concrete prison now stands, there was once a fortress. Completed in 1859
and loaded with guns, its mission was
protecting the millions of dollars in gold
rush treasure, first from foreign enemies and
then when the Civil War broke out from a Confederate
army desperate to finance their failing war. 75 years later, when Alcatraz
became a federal prison, the gangsters penned
up here had no idea that a Civil War superfortress
was right beneath their feet. No kidding. Look at that. The main cell block
on Alcatraz, B and C, the two cell blocks, 303 men
at the highest, 336 cells. A fairly small sized prison
for the worst of the worst. Yes, it was the
end of the line. You can almost think
of it as isolation for the entire federal prison
system was here on Alcatraz. And right across the Bay,
how close to freedom they are. They could actually
hear the cable car bells from San Francisco, smell
the Ghirardelli chocolate and the Hills Brothers coffee. OK, Don, we're going to go
into an area visitors don't go. It's secured off with one of the
original federal prison locks. Grab a hard hat. We're going to go downstairs. So look at this. We're going under Alcatraz into
the dungeons of what was once one of the most important
fortresses in the country. [music playing] So we're back in a
Civil War here, right? Yeah, this area down
here, Don, was 1857 onward. We are standing in a dry moat. This is the outside of the
moat basically right here. DON WILDMAN: The original fort
was a citadel three stories tall with 104 cannons, a
dry moat surrounding it, and two drawbridges. The first two floors were
ringed with narrow, rifle slit windows. 433 soldiers were
quartered on the grounds. And the basement of the
guardhouse doubled as a lockup for dozens of Confederate
prisoners of war. This is where the last
area of defense was. If somebody attacked
Alcatraz, got onto the island, got through all the
cannons to get up here, you still have one
last area of defense. You could basically last in this
building with food and water upwards of a couple of
months if you needed to. DON WILDMAN: These
defenses weren't overkill. San Francisco and its
massive gold reserve valued at tens of millions
today was a tempting target for a cash-strapped
Confederate army. There's enough gold coming
out of the Sierra Nevadas every two or three days
that could have funded the entire Civil War. So there was a fear that the
South would attack the Bay Area. Was that ever proven that
they had that kind of plan? Well, there was a ship a few
days outside the Golden Gate that was getting ready to attack
San Francisco when the Civil War actually ended. So the threat was
definitely there. Down here, you're in
the Civil War, basically. They left the foundation
and built the famous prison on top of it. After the war, the
fort was converted into first, a military
and then a federal prison. The old brick structure
was demoed down to the first floor then replaced
with steel-reinforced concrete. These hyper secure areas
11 feet below ground remain and mutated into the
dreaded isolation cells known as the holes. Initially, these rooms were
built as powder magazines for the citadel. OK. But when this became a
federal prison in 1934, these four areas had
bars put on them. And this was the dungeon area. Wow. These were the original cells. They were down here in
darkness up to 24 hours a day. But remember, this was the
end of the end of the line for the whole prison system. Right. Screw up, you get on Alcatraz. Screw up on Alcatraz,
you end up down here. Right. From Civil War era prisoners
to 1930s gangsters, there were over 14 doomed
escape attempts by men so close to freedom, they
could almost taste it. Look at that. This is some sort of
drainage tunnel, probably a sewer or something like that. You can smell the sea
air coming in there. It must connect outside. So this must go straight out. And I'm thinking if I was a
prisoner stuck in this, down in the hole, if I dug
right through here, maybe this is my
escape from Alcatraz. But I've got it much easier than
any desperate prisoner trying to escape. I've got my SWAT kit. Now, just so you get an idea
of how tight this really is. Just so you understand,
I'm in the pitch dark here. And if I wasn't, I would
have a better sense of how tight this place
really is and a lot more claustrophobic. But I can't see anything. So it doesn't matter. Only you can on this
infrared camera. How cool is that? OK, so I've reached
the end of this tunnel. It comes down about 100 feet. And right above my head, only
five feet up, is a manhole. So that's daylight
looking out there. All right, so basically, there's
a storm drain, a sewage drain, for the old fortifications
directly beneath Alcatraz. I'm in a tunnel beneath
Alcatraz, how weird. If I'd been a prisoner up there,
man, I wish I knew about this. [music playing] [music playing] I'm on Hawk Hill in
the Marin Headlands. Since the days of the
Spanish, this area was vital to the defense
of San Francisco. And you can see why. There's the Golden Gate
Bridge, San Francisco Bay. These hills are laced with
military infrastructure of every era. And I'm meeting with
park ranger, John Porter. He's going to explain to me
how San Francisco's defenses adapted to the nuclear age. John?
- Hey, Don. How you doing? DON WILDMAN: John was taking
me to a former World War II defensive structure turned
nuclear missile site. It's a piece of San
Francisco's underground that could have sparked World
War III, and almost did. So imagine, I mean,
this whole place was basically ultra
tight high security. You can now see in here
if you're driving by. But this would have been
guarded with attack dogs, military guards everywhere. You couldn't get in this place. The year was 1951. The Soviet Union and China
entered a deadly arms race. The US had to act
fast, fortifying all its major cities,
including San Francisco. Nike missile sites were the
ultimate anti-aircraft defense systems. Their sole purpose was to
identify incoming aircraft formations bearing
nuclear weapons and obliterate them
with nuclear warheads before they reached
their target. And for 20 years, this
secret site in San Francisco was ready to do just that. So what is all this here? Well, this is the radars. There were five radars. And they were up on
top of Wolf Ridge. And these are the battery
control vans, the computers. DON WILDMAN: If Russian or
Chinese planes were detected by radar, the computers would
then guide the nuclear warheads 28 miles into the air,
exploding the bombers and their deadly
nuclear payload. So this is where
they ran the show? Yeah, there's the
computer's right there. DON WILDMAN: The technology
may look primitive. But it was good enough
to incinerate the world. Once, God forbid, there was an
attack, what happens in here? Well, first thing they do
is push this button, the siren button. Yeah. You'd be calling all your
your soldiers to your stations. Wow. That would be a
terrifying moment. DON WILDMAN: Nike missile
sites were America's answer to a growing threat. But perhaps an
even greater threat was storing 10,000 pound nuclear
missiles less than 10 miles from a major metropolis. One false move
and San Francisco, the state of California, and
most of the Western seaboard would be history. The nuclear arsenal that
could have doomed mankind was kept safe in
the underground. [music playing] Whoa! Awesome! Damn, look at these things. What are they? These are the Nike missiles. These are Nike
Hercules missiles. They are lethal looking
bastards, aren't they? There are 12 individual missiles
at this site, one of 12 sites that once ringed the Bay Area. At the height of
the Cold War, there were 280 top secret Nike missile
sites buried throughout the US. Whoa, are these armed? No, everything here is inert. But this one here has
been completely restored and looks exactly the way a Nike
Hercules missile would look. They're huge. So how fast is this thing going? This is traveling at
about 2,000 miles an hour. This one gets up to 3.65
times the speed of sound. No kidding, like a jet
fighter, I mean, faster than-- Much faster than
that, like a bullet. And this 6,500 pound
white hot lawn dart comes back to Earth unguided. Really? That's why they launch
it at slight angles. And over the ocean. Anywhere but here. This is the dangerous
part up here, right? This is the warhead. Where that red stripe
is right up to the fins, that's your warhead. This is a W-31 nuclear
device inside here. And this is 40 kilotons. 40 kilotons. Compare that to Hiroshima
or something like that. Hiroshima was
approximately 14 kilotons. 14. So this is three or four times
more powerful than the A-bomb that we know. That's correct. DON WILDMAN: Once a target
had been identified by radar and confirmed by
a spotter plane, the missiles could be raised to
the surface, locked on target, and launched. Anyone within a
quarter mile radius would be killed by
sound waves alone. At 150 decibels, the force
would literally push soft tissue into the bone. Its flight path would cover
28 miles in 30 seconds, speeding straight up,
then rotating 180 degrees, plummeting downward,
and detonating in the center of the
incoming bomber formation. So they're literally throwing
a nuclear explosion up into the air. A very large
nuclear explosion. Wow. Minutes after the
initial explosion, nuclear fallout far
worse than Hiroshima would rain down on the city. Depending on weather patterns,
up to 25% of the population could be dead of radiation
poisoning within a few months. By the 1970s, these
deadly weapons were outdated,
replaced on both sides by Intercontinental
Ballistic Missiles that didn't rely on planes and pilots
to guide them to their target. They could be launched
from distances over 3,500 miles away. It cost millions of dollars to
decommission the Nike missile sites nationwide. This is the only one
perfectly preserved in a state of readiness, a
testament to how precarious the Cold War really was. It was potentially
the most dangerous time in the history of this country. Really? And we came that close
on a number of occasions. Like when? Well, there's the
Cuban Missile Crisis. So take me to the Cuban
Missile Crisis, October 1962. What would this place have
been like at that moment? This place probably would
have been on its highest state of readiness.
- Really? For how long? Well, that was
defense condition one. So the entire military was
on a state of readiness. Is that DEFCON 1? Is that what that is?
- Yes. - OK.
- Yeah. So DEFCON 1,
what's the difference than what we see here? Everybody was
at their stations. And all the missiles were
prepped and ready to go. One button away from
nuclear holocaust. Exactly. How many people die? What happens to these places? Well, the Eastern
seaboard I think had about 50 million people. Yeah. You could look at
that being destroyed. 50 million people just
destroyed inside of a day. Yes. Along with 50 million
over there as well. And escalating. So the world could be
destroyed in a single battle basically. Had it flashed
into a hot war, I think that's a very
likely scenario. It feels especially
present when you're standing with the very
weapons that would be used. So in the nightmare scenario,
these guys down here, the launch crew, have to
pull this thing across. This is the launcher rails. I can do this myself, which
is remarkable considering-- considering this is 10,000
pounds of nuclear rocket. Comes right over here. John, go ahead and set us off. [loud alarm] [music playing] Could we get this
thing up all the way? Wow. There she goes. Incredible. So this thing is
armed and ready to go. And when this takes
off, it shoots 28 miles out there at the enemy target,
Russian planes, Chinese planes coming towards our shores. And when that thing
hits its target, blows those planes out
of the air, watch out. World War III has just begun. [music playing] Until the late
1840s, San Francisco was still a small settlement
with an inhospitable landscape. But in 1848, gold was
discovered in the Sierra Nevadas and tens of thousands of
people flocked to the city. Unimaginable wealth was flowing
out of that harbor every day in the form of pure gold. Small settlement no more. San Francisco was
now a boomtown. But in the coming years,
the overcrowded streets and ramshackle neighborhoods
would literally fuel a major disaster. The city that grew
from gold rush treasure is perched on top of the
San Andreas fault line. State of the art
subterranean engineering saved San Francisco once before
and is the key to the city's future. When disaster struck in 1906,
it was the brilliant design of this building, the San
Francisco Mint, that preserved a fortune, rebuilt the
city, and saved a nation from economic collapse. Eric. Hey, Don. DON WILDMAN: Gold rush
expert, Eric Christofferson, led us into a building that
was the Fort Knox of its day. Opened in 1874, the elegant
32,000 square foot main floor was quickly crowded with
filthy prospectors right out of the mountains, looking to
exchange gold dust and nuggets for cash. And so you're talking about
people literally coming in from the streets with
bags of gold, gold dust. And they start the process here. First thing you would do is
you would melt down the nuggets and dust and start turning
it into the strips of gold or silver that could be
then punched into coins. So the whole process takes
place in this building? Yeah. DON WILDMAN: $200 million
of gold and silver were locked away in 11
impenetrable vaults. [music playing] So try opening the
first two vault doors. God. How heavy is this thing? It's about-- one of the vault
doors weighs as much as 40 tons. Really? Oh boy, ouch. Equally, equally heavy. - There you go.
- All right. Let's go in. DON WILDMAN: In
the 19th century, we'd be shot on sight for
entering this steel-lined vault without security clearance. This had sacks upon
sacks of burlap bags with silver coins in it. And it was stacked so thick
that the weight of them has left the coins-- you can actually see
all the coin imprints. DON WILDMAN: This
building was made to protect these sacks of
newly minted gold rush treasure from robbers and an even bigger
threat, the ravages of mother nature. They built this building
to withstand earthquakes. So it was
seismically equipped? Yeah. DON WILDMAN: First, the
clay beneath the building was replaced with layers
of wet and dry sand. In case of an earthquake,
the sand absorbs the jolts and protects the
building, a technique so advanced it's still used
by seismic engineers today. A four foot thick concrete slab
reinforced with iron locomotive rails floated on
top of this base. It all supported a wrought
iron frame covered in masonry and allowed the whole
building to move as one impenetrable box. These hefty
engineering precautions were put to the ultimate
test on April 18, 1906. The earthquake hits. And a fire ensues
for three days. DON WILDMAN: That
spring morning, a 7.9 quake hit with a force
of 15 million tons of TNT. It toppled hundreds of buildings
and ruptured the city's water system. When a cooking fire broke out,
there was no water to fight it. The blaze spread, burning
out of control for days and killing thousands. The mint and its 58
workers and security guards who had taken refuge inside
it survived the quake, only to have the fire close in. You've got flames
rising, in some cases, as high as 20 stories. The temperature's 2,000 degrees. Wow. It's encircling
the whole mint. They close all
those iron shutters. The glass becomes liquid
and just runs down. DON WILDMAN: The men would
have been cooked alive and the building incinerated,
except for a lucky stroke in the underground. In two different spots
were artesian wells. Mm-hmm. These wells were
put into operation one week before the
earthquake in 1906. Really? Using water from
their brand new wells, the mint's defenders put out
the fires around the building, saving the vast fortune of
gold and silver inside of it and staving off a
national financial crisis. So this is one of
two wells that were-- Exactly. --really the reason that this
building survives the worst urban disaster in the country. Today, San Francisco
is once again banking on a massive
underground engineering project to protect itself. But this time, something
more precious than money is at stake, the
city's drinking water. [music playing] Today, San Francisco has
nearly completed construction on a massive reservoir
underneath the sunset neighborhood. It's part of a $65 million
seismic upgrade of the city's water systems. It'll be capable of surviving
even a devastating 7.9 earthquake. And we're the last TV
crew allowed access before the millions of gallons
of water come rushing in. Hey. Oh, hi, Don. DON WILDMAN: I met with Paul
Maza of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to
see how the city is protecting its most valued resource
from the next big one or a terrorist attack. So this is the Sunset Reservoir. Yes, it is. So how big is this place? 20 acres. DON WILDMAN: The
$4 billion project will safeguard the water
for 2.4 million people. The entrance is up
in front of us here. But we're not going to allow
you to show the entrance. For security reasons, we like
to keep a lot of this stuff off camera. Sure, the drinking
water of San Francisco. The drinking water, we
don't want to show access to the drinking water. OK, turn the cameras off. [music playing] Whoa, it's cavernous. It's 10 acres. It's four city blocks square. Really? 30 plus feet high. No kidding. This will be filled with water? Filled with water. So the 1906
earthquake, you're still worried about this
earthquake that might hit. Yes, well, earthquakes
don't just happen once. So we're anticipating
up to a 7.9 earthquake in the next 30 years. DON WILDMAN: In order to
withstand the fierce shaking of a 7.9 quake, the
reservoir's 300 pillars are shored up by diagonal
bracings and moment frames that hold up a roof over
four city blocks long. If an earthquake strikes,
the moment frames allow the pillars to move up
and down, but not side to side, while each of the 19
different roof sections can move independently. So this is the pipe that
actually brings in the water. Yes, it is. How big is this pipe? It's 54 inches in diameter. And that can bring
in how much water? 40-50 million gallons a day. DON WILDMAN: For two years, this
was a job site for 200 workers. But in just a few weeks, the
only people coming down here will be scuba divers
checking for cracks. So this is the end point-- my echo. At the other end of this pipe is
eventually the Sierra Nevadas. We are some of the last
people to be standing in this huge water tank
before tens of millions of gallons of water
pour right through here and fill this place back up. Isn't that right? Isn't that right? Yes, it is. Yes, it is. [music playing] [music playing] Gold fever in California
drew hundreds of thousands of Chinese immigrants
from across the Pacific. A lucky few struck it rich. But most were left to fend for
themselves in the San Francisco slums, in a labyrinth
of sin and vise hidden beneath the streets. By the end of the 1800s,
Chinatown's underground was a snarl of coal tunnels,
foot traffic passageways, and 2.5 miles of
brick sewer tunnels. Above ground, crammed
into tenements were hordes of men, workers
fleeing famine and disaster in China. Racist immigration
policies designed to keep the men from
bringing over their families and settling in the US made
it almost impossible for women to come here legally. So they were smuggled
in as slaves. Girls as young as five
were forced to work as servants or as prostitutes. But a lucky few found freedom
with the help of a crusader named Donaldina Cameron and
a warren of coal tunnels that became the West Coast
Underground Railroad. [music playing] I'm meeting a guy
named Jack Shalpe. He actually worked
at Cameron House in the '60s and '70s,
new Miss Cameron herself. He's going to tell
me her amazing story. Hi, Jack. Hello, Don. Nice to have you here. Thank you very much. Welcome to Cameron
House and Chinatown. DON WILDMAN: Jack has known
women sold into slavery as little girls who escaped
a lifetime of misery, because of this safe house,
the tunnels beneath it, and the woman the girls
called, beloved mother, but slave masters
called white devil. So she was in the business
of saving these young girls from this horrible fate. That's right. Can we go in? Please. DON WILDMAN: Today,
Cameron House functions as a community center for San
Francisco's Asian population. But 130 years ago, church
aid workers would be sneaking around here in
the dead of night, bringing in little
girls and teenagers they had rescued
from the brothels. But as Cameron House's
reputation grew, hiding the girls got trickier. So the owners would come
looking for them here. So the owner would
get his own policeman. Their policemen-- Ah, the corrupt. --would help them get the
girl with a search warrant. All right, so there was a
little bit of corruption going on. Yeah, right. DON WILDMAN: The owners used
30 year service contracts to legitimize their claims. When they showed up at the
front door demanding the return of their property,
the hunted girl was taken down the back stairs
to a subterranean hideout. [music playing] So what's this? This was a coal chute. And if the building was
searched for one girl, the girl would
hide in the tunnel. Can I look up there? Oh, please. All right, well, this
is a really small space meant for a very small person. But I think I can
squeeze up here. Wow-- this is tiny. So that's the street
up above us, OK? So the cellar is over here. Under the street is that way. This is essentially
a coal tunnel. And if you were a
small child, certainly, you could slip right back here. So I'm going down there. All right, [inaudible]. Let's see how I
get in this thing. All right. These are tight
spaces for, you know, meant for small people,
little kids, not for me. At any given time, there might
have been 10, 15 children in this place alone. So if I was one of these little
girls who'd been rescued, I'm put back here in this
space inside the wall while the fate of
my life is decided. And I would have been down
here keeping perfectly quiet. The lawlessness and overcrowding
in 19th century Chinatown was a recipe for disaster. And in 1900, it boiled over in
the form of a deadly epidemic. [music playing] At the turn of the century,
the same years Miss Cameron was using the underground to
save children from slavery, Chinatown was struck
by the bubonic plague. The neighborhood was
quarantined, locked down. And the only way they
could break the siege was by using the tunnels and
sewers beneath the streets. The first bubonic plague
victim appeared in 1900. Afraid of bad PR, the
California State government went into cover
up mode, sneaking the evidence, dead bodies,
out of the quarantine zone. Some of the sewer tunnels likely
used for this covert operation are still in use today. City sanitation
expert, Don Spears, is taking me down
into the sewers. Can I take a look down there? Yes. I'll get suited up, right? Yes. Down under Chinatown. [music playing] Oof, this is a
tiny, little sewer. Yes, it is. How big is this thing? Five foot tall and three
foot wide at the spring line. And these are typical
sewers all around Chinatown. Right. These sewers drain
directly to the Bay. And the closest-- I can hear it draining. As we're sitting in here, people
are flushing their toilets and dumping their laundry. That's right. These well-engineered sewers
carrying waste out of the city were also used as a
superhighway, by wharf rats, many of them carrying
a deadly disease. Well, there's a nice little
rat right there, good. So bubonic plague
comes from fleas. Is that right? Right, they were
the transmitter. And the fleas are on the rats. Right. The rats are in the sewers. Right. And they're migrating about. When the rat dies and
his body gets cold, the fleas jump off
looking for another host. DON WILDMAN: The rats may
have caused the plague. But it was people
who kept it going. Instead of treating
the outbreak, they tried to deny it by
quietly disposing of the corpses of plague victims. Hidden from view, conveniently
leading to the harbor, the sewers became a
macabre garbage chute. So if you had to get a body
out of here, out of Chinatown, you get them through-- you take
it out through the tunnels. This would be the easiest way. DON WILDMAN: Tightly wrapped
corpses would be lowered down through a manhole and
strapped to a board. The board rested
on the rat rails on either side of
the narrow tunnel. Since the tunnels
ran downhill, it was easy work to push the dead
weight 800 yards to the end of the line, San
Francisco Harbor. And the bodies were
never seen again. Do they have any idea how many
people died in this plague? Well, they do of the bodies
that they actually found. Right. And there was I
think over 100 or so. But there's no way of counting
the ones they didn't find. DON WILDMAN: Isolation and
racism caused human suffering to fester here in Chinatown. And for both the
living and the dead, one way out was the underground. [music playing] [music playing] The same
counterculture revolution that produced San Francisco's
fabled summer of love spawned a lesser known,
more subversive movement called the Suicide Club. It's a secret group
of urban explorers whose creed it is to live every
day as if it's their last, to confront their fears, and
to enter into a world of chaos. And no sooner did they enter
into San Francisco's abandoned and forgotten underground
then they discovered that their upstanding
city was also a top secret military stronghold
buried beneath the Earth. [music playing] I'm meeting a guy
named John Law, one of the original members
of the Suicide Club. He's taking me to some of
the most secret undergrounds in the city. In fact, I'm not even allowed
to know where they are. Hi.
- Hi. - Hey, good morning.
- I'm Don. I'm John Law. Pleased to meet you. DON WILDMAN: For
almost a decade, John and his fellow rebels got a
thrill out of defying authority and pushing buttons. They rode trolley cars
naked, climbed bridges, and explored the vast
underworld of an abandoned military complex that few in
the City of Love knew about. Official entrances to the World
War II and Cold War bunkers were sealed up in the 1970s. Nice to meet you. I'm Don. But John and a band
of urban explorers refused to let a huge
chapter of the city's history just rot away in the dark. So they found a way in. We're not going to tell
you what the location is. You're going to be blindfolded. But we're going into an
underground chamber that is not accessible to anyone. DON WILDMAN: To protect the
location of the hidden access point, our crew had
to be blindfolded while we rode there. And that meant we had to turn
over our cameras to strangers. Take us to the underground. All right, let's roll. DON WILDMAN: We had no
idea where we were going, except that it was somewhere
underneath Golden Gate Recreational Area, which
covers almost 75,000 acres. Rumor has it that
below this park lies a top secret underground
military complex first developed during World War II. Make sure those boys can't
see anything back there. Keep those on, guys. We're walking you up so-- I'm all connected
to this camera. I understand. Come on up here. We're almost there. And another big step up right-- got it? Feel right here. There's like a piece of-- yeah. Flat on your butt, OK. All right, wow, God, could
it be a little tighter? [music playing] [inaudible] Thank you. You all good? Yeah, good. We just came down about
30 feet from here. Outside is there. I have no idea where that
is, where we are right now. But the drop is down another-- 50 feet. --50 feet down. What is this shaft
we just came down? It's a long concrete shaft. It's an air shaft and also
access to probably a viewing post up above. Survival supplies furnished
by Office of Civil Defense. How cool is this? Total artifact,
Cold War definitely. Yeah, and it's big. Oh, look at that. DON WILDMAN: John estimates this
bunker covers as much as 82,000 square feet underground. We're seeing the racks
for carrying ordnance. This would have been a major
military base basically. Yeah, this is part of a major
military complex that went on for miles, and miles, and miles. To the best of your knowledge,
what did this place look like in its original state? Well, it would've looked
pretty much exactly like it does now, but without all
of the bad '70s graffiti. So concrete corridors, they
had an overhead rail here, which is rusted away. They had bunks set up
in here, their kitchen. They would've had
living quarters. They would have had
storage for their weapons. Dating back to
around the '50s maybe? I can't say the period. I don't want to tip
you off too much. But let's say sometime
between 1940 and 1955. OK. DON WILDMAN: John wouldn't say. But this cavernous
underground space has all the hallmarks of a
World War II munitions bunker. The war in the Pacific
depended heavily on ships, cargo, and munitions
from San Francisco Harbor. So existing fortifications
dating back to the Civil War were reinforced. And new larger bunkers were dug
deep beneath city park land. So this rack above my head
would have been used to move artillery ordnance, I guess. So you got trucks
moving through here. You got soldiers
moving in and out. Maybe there's a gun
emplacement above my head. I don't know. I don't know where I am. But if all this was as
serious as it looks, there was a lot of
activity down here. So when you first started going
underground back in the '70s, were you surprised at how much
military infrastructure was in San Francisco? We were a little
bit surprised. And then after we were
exploring for some time and we went into a variety
of different bunkers of different ages. I mean, tunnels that
were as old as the 1860s. And it has always been viewed
as a major target, this part of the country. San Francisco certainly has. I mean, you know, somebody's
got to get those hippies. [inaudible] What is that? That's in the air shaft that
goes up to the [inaudible] post. - Can I take a look?
- Yeah. Need a lift? Yeah. It's weird to think that this
place is all completely sealed off. This country went through
20, 30 years convinced that they were going
to get attacked. And so they were
building fortifications like this deep underground. In its day, this may have been
a top secret location, defended by fences and military patrols. Now its only
protection is the fact that almost no one
knows it's even here, except for the Suicide Club. I can hear people. So this is park
land that's over us? Yes. [inaudible] Within a lot
of the various park land. That's true. The public is out there. Yes. Everybody thinks these
places are [inaudible].. You can look through there. There they are. So we're trying to
stay perfectly quiet. Because we don't want
anybody outside to know that you can actually get in here. This would be a bad
thing if everybody knew how to get in here. It's dangerous in here. The Suicide Club's subterranean
exploits are a lot like our crew's. We're all digging down to
uncover the stories hiding just out of sight in the underworld. Ever since we first
started coming down here, since they sealed the bunker,
we always leave a little note. To the Suicide Club,
thanks for taking us down. Cities of the Underworld. All right. In San Francisco, boom
times have gone hand in hand with brutality and catastrophe,
earthquakes, fires, and plague. But few know how close the
city has come to enemy attack. The only thing that saved it,
the massive fortifications of its underworld. [music playing]
