Land was barren. He dug 10-acre underground village & orchard

Fresno was a desert you know we're a big agricultural area now because it's been so developed but originally Fresno was basically a desert so it gets very hot here it's not the most fun place to live in the summer time baldassar Forest deer excavated about 20 acres Underground so he did this for 40 years he had figured something out here that was a really smart way to live so that's what this first area was really about was the motivation of getting out of the Heat it wasn't until later on that he started to get this inspiration of this is actually a really good way to live and I can grow my trees down here and I can create this amazing home for myself down here foreign so there's some above ground and some underground I guess probably people who have passed this you really don't know there's anything here I have no idea they have no idea what it is there's lots of openings yes underground acres and Acres of hidden bedrooms yes yeah they're just different rooms passageways Courtyards so I mean all types of rooms I mean we can see right over here that's that first tree coming down the stairs this one's right above the water well so it just it keeps going um the one where you see right here with all the trees coming out that the courtyard that has the carob and the low plots you can see that growing there the courtyard with the bathtub I mean it's a whole other world down there I kind of like that it's a Hidden Gem and that you have to want to find it to find it and you know here it is existing right off of a major highway and yeah people often just drive right past it this area specifically is known as Highway City because it's right off of our major highway 99. so you can see it's really developed into a lot you know gas stations liquor stores tire places and then there's us this area is hot it's dry it is yes very very hot over 100 degrees Fahrenheit almost every day in the summer time so it gets very intense with the heat so yeah which is actually what inspired baltusar Forest year to create this place was to get out of that heat okay so so if you bought land yes so he came to Fresno from Sicily in the early 1900s with the idea that he wanted to grow Citrus here he grew up around Citrus his father taught him how to grow Citrus and Fresno was such a booming agricultural area at the time so he came to Fresno to buy that land thinking he had got this amazing deal but it turned out that the land was filled with a sedimentary rock called hard pan and you cannot grow Citrus in that and he had never heard of hardpan before so this really came as a shock to him that he had spent all of his money on a piece of land that was basically useless to him so can you see it I mean is it what was it well no no no this is actually the top soil which is why he wasn't aware that that's what he was getting there were several inches of this good topsoil so he thought he had this great piece of land this was an up-and-coming area for Farmers so he was very excited the hard pen was a surprise and it's a few inches beneath the topsoil so when he first started creating it these stairs right here it was actually a ramp that he would use to push wheelbarrows of Earth up to ground level he made it into stairs later on so what this started as is just a way to get out of the heat because once he realized that he was not going to be able to grow Citrus on his own land he had to start hiring himself out as a laborer and so he's working all day in the hot sun mostly digging ditches for irrigation canals so he's miserable he wants a cool place to come home to and so he started thinking back to Sicily and how Wine sellers were so common there so that's what it started as just a single seller where he could move his bed underground and cool off so this is all by hand all by hand pickaxes shovels wheelbarrows and his own strength he was doing it himself so he's working all day as a farm laborer and then he's coming home and working on this in the evening and he does that for about 20 years by the time he's around 40 years old though he's actually producing enough fruit on his land that he's able to sell it and make his living that way and the reason he's able to get to that point is because he was able to successfully figure out how to grow his fruit trees Underground so this room we're actually surrounded by the hard pan itself we have it in its natural form but also where he's broken it out into bricks essentially and use that to reinforce the walls so he's not going out and buying stones or buying bricks he's just using that hard pan that his land was made from this is the natural hard pan this kind of reddish color clay no it's not clay and so here you can see where he's broken it down into stones and then set it back up again but that's hard pan that becomes Stone it's so hard yes yes it's that part of it yes I have heard that it's the third hardest sedimentary rock in the world so it's actually very common in Fresno most residents have some hard pan in their backyards but they usually have a few inches of it and most people use Dynamite to get past it he had three to five feet of hard pan so in the beginning it must have seemed just endless but eventually after digging through it he did find okay there is an end to it at some point and that's when he discovered that he could make these rooms down here a lot of it was experimenting he's getting past that three to five feet of hard pan he's finding a soil that he thinks could be nutrient Rich for the trees so he starts out just by planting this is actually one of the first trees that he planted in the early 1900s um he starts out by just making a planter for it putting a skylight in because of course the tree needs sun and seeing if it will grow and a lot of his early trees he really you can see him experimenting with the sizes and the shapes of the Skylight because he wanted to see how much sun he needed to let in that they could Thrive but he also doesn't want to take away from this cool Earth environment that he's created for himself and it seems to be a really great environment for the trees because most citrus trees in this area have a lifespan of about 50 years and ours are over a hundred but they're protected from what a lot of the citrus trees in the area deal with which is the frost and the intense Heat exactly you feel that right away you are down here 10 to 15 degree drop and that's that's it's significant it's not only for humans but for plant soup exactly yes it's very comfortable for them yeah I mean you can see these oranges I mean this is coming from a tree that was planted in 1906. you can see this is the natural hard pan and then he would take the pickaxe and he would break it into these chunks and then he would use it and in the beginning using as little cement as possible to secure them because once again this man does not have a lot of money he tries to just put a little bit to keep them together there well he certainly knew what he was doing uh you can definitely see the inspiration from his upbringing you were asking about collapses before you can see everything has these arches growing up in Sicily he would have seen that style of architecture and knew that that would last for hundreds of years so like balls from Raman song exactly you can see that inspiration from the catacombs we know he did spend some time in Rome in his early 20s before coming to the United States so he's definitely drawing upon that but really a lot of this is trial and error and him figuring out how to do it because he was not formally educated as an architect or an engineer so architecturally you know what he was doing oh yeah yeah so this actually is where after he decided he was going to put this tree in here he moved in here so this was his like second bedroom yes exactly exactly oh wow so you can see even more so that he's wanting to cool off even more so you make it more enclosed he's put a couple of benches in here for himself and over here we have his first kitchen underground so this uh was the pipe for his wood burning stove he would have had an ice box right under here so very simple but it was all he needed it was just to get out of that heat can you imagine how long it would have taken with hand tools to dig over well this area right here he did pretty quickly actually it seems like an overwhelming task but the goal was to get out of the heat in the summer of 1906 and that's when he started with July of 1906 and by the end of that year this area was already created was that a particularly hot year it was it was its first summer here but it also was a record-breaking heat do you know how hot it cost 115 I believe so he was just miserable in it and decided he was going to go underground to the skyline is interesting you'll notice it's more cone-shaped to put the Venturi effect into place because you have the kitchen with the wood burning stove this is a hotter room so to keep it cooler we're putting that Venturi effect there inventory effect is what it's funneling is it a fun thing so it has to be a narrow what do you have yeah so it has to be more narrow at the top so it sucks the hot air out and it pushes the cool air down so you can really feel the breeze even in this area he really had an amazing mind to think of what problems he was going to deal with and finding ways to solve them so he probably wasn't using any sophisticated work toward it but this was like bioclimatism or all these expensive things we're talking about these days a man very much ahead of his time so I showed you his early home in the 1930s he moved into this home which we consider his his upgraded living quarters his new digs and you can really see at this point in the 1930s he's been working down here for 20 plus years so he's really making a comfortable home for himself so this is his dining room look at that table it actually doubles as a planter so he actually had a dwarf orange tree growing out of the center so it's it's decorative but also you have fresh food right there at your table so he just he kept digging and as if he found a room he liked and he thought well this make it a good dining room yes maybe he just kept going exactly yeah he I think he would take a lot of what he'd be inspired by and then create with that and you know for a creative person it provides a lot of freedom once he became comfortable with the medium that he was working with you know he'd get to an area and be like let's turn this into this we have this kitchen over here so this is where he moved his ice box and the wood burning stove he brought a radio in at this point he did like listening to the radio so he has some conventional furniture down here he does start to get conventional Furniture yes he had his wood burning stove okay he had his ice box and we just saw his dining room but he also had I like to think of it as a breakfast nook you know he just has this little table here a bench next to it so if he wanted to sit down and have his breakfast right there nice and easy straight from the stove to the table he's setting up areas for you know the pantry sacks of flour or potatoes shut more shelving in here so you can see it definitely is an upgraded kitchen from that first one we saw much more spacious yes go in yes yes it's a bit of a maze it is all connected in some way it's easy to get turned around in it and there's always light coming down yeah I see that he even here there's always there's always natural light always because well he wasn't looking to live in a cave you know he still wanted that bright Airy environment uh which is why it's for a while there were stories of him being this mole man living underground as you can see this is not a mole man environment he was not living in a cave he was just creating a unique home underground but he clearly liked his light and Airy spaces I think going do you want to see his bedrooms yeah yeah let's bedroom he lived alone but he has more than one bedroom he does yes uh for the different times of year so this is the summer bedroom so we have this nice big window so he would be able to have a breeze come in here and even stepping in here right now it's noticeably cooler than where we just were where you're going into now is his winter bedroom which you can see it's much more enclosed he learned that hard pan can work as a natural insulator so he actually put a small fireplace in this room and he would be able to close off this area and stay warm so I think this is one of the few areas that you would actually describe as more cave-like but that's because he's thinking of the winter time and it does get fairly cold down here in the winter we have more damp Winters not snow but a fogginess to the air dampness in the air so I think this is where he was really looking at closing himself in lighting a fire and still being comfortable in here how was she able to have a fireplace I don't see a flu uh it's in the wall and in fact it is back to back with another fireplace in the room on the other side of this they share a flu so there was no danger of smoke it was ventilated okay now once again maybe he had some trial and error with that but as we've seen he's a pretty brilliant man what's this ah so this is one of his Peak holes so I mentioned before Bulbasaur did not have a fence surrounding the property and there were a lot of people that were very curious about what he was creating and very often baldusar would like to know who was here before he went out to see them so just like today so many of us have our little camera on our on our doorbell he would set up he Cole so if he heard someone walking around he could just take a look and see who was coming in and they're very often pointed down because they're actually pointed at people's feet we have to think farming community in the 1930s 1940s most people living in this area were probably pretty identifiable by their shoes and so this one specifically was aimed at what he considered his front door so it's actually in here right there oh there it is okay so this was his fish pond because the challenge with fish is keeping them fresh right and he's working with an ice box so you know keeping fish for a little while might be a little challenging so instead he'd bring them back here after fishing he would keep them alive until he was ready to eat them and just catch them out of his pond let's see the whole world down here yes and this is also where he would take his baths so that is his bathtub here it's a nice spot for a bath yeah to carve the shelter for it so this is the carob tree so that was common in the part of Sicily that he was from in filari they had lots of carob trees and then we also have loquat trees out here so I think this since this is his living quarters he's thinking of those fruits that maybe he grew up with as a child but he is not finding in this area too much so he's bringing those in I also like to think of these as kind of snack food trees because they all produce very small fruits that are easy to have a handful of them and just pop them in your mouth so you know a little snacking area really nice I love it it's just like it has a little view as well yes you have a beautiful view everywhere and in here he even started to incorporate even more of a creative side of his there are paintings on the walls in here and these are similar to trees from the part of Sicily where he grew up and at one time this went all the way across the bed it's unfortunately has uh Fallen away over the years but underneath it we can see his pick marks where he carved away at this wall so how he would create each room really depended on the actual stone that he was hitting at the time so there were some areas that he's building up with the stonework of the hard pan but other areas he would find a really tough spot of hardpan and he just decided you know what this is secure on its own I'm just going to shape it right so he knew that he had some sort of instinctual yes knowledge or he had no training as a technical Architect no not at all we actually think he had about a fourth grade formal education so all of this is him learning as he goes teaching himself how to do this so yes I think there was just something in him that he was a brilliant man that was able to figure out how to do this and I'm sure he you know made a lot of mistakes along the way to get there but he kept going and he figured out the best way to create it was probably super satisfactory to just create this whole Rich world that is super livable out of just nothing yes turrets exactly especially once he figured out how to do it I mean there must have been so much freedom and being to realize I have this skill I can develop the skill I can make whatever kind of home I want to that's really an amazing feeling to feel like the sky's the limit here it's always hard pan this is all hard pan yeah yeah Roman Arch or something yes and that was the other thing he actually made his own forms to create these arches so perfectly amazing I mean that's the kind of thing that normally you need training yes exactly yes that's not a simple thing to make a Roman Arch no but he was able to figure out how to do that and clearly they've been done correctly because they're holding up after all this time yeah you can see more conventional Furniture in here so we did bring in a standard wood table and chairs that you don't see that too much around here but once again he was having visitors so he's making a Parlor Room for himself a place to have visitors come in there's nobody around here if I was doing this right no no one else around here was doing this and living on his own too I mean he was a bachelor and so we could just make his home however he wanted it no it seems like this house is really too big for a bachelor like it is yes hoping that the people would move in I think creating a village I think at some point he did have the thought that he'd like to have a wife yeah at some point like so he had some girlfriends over the years so I think there might have been a hope at one point he was also very close with his brother's family Giuseppe would bring his children down here on a regular basis they would have dinner here together so it wasn't just him by himself here there was family and he wanted space for that family so what's what percentage of uh of the old underground World we've seen so far so far I've probably taken you through about an acre and a half of it so well today we have about four acres left yeah but he had about 20 acres by the time he passed away so it was quite extensive today where Highway 99 is today he had tunnels all the way out there yeah some of the neighborhoods in this area do still have a room or two of his in their yard so some of them do still exist they're not connected to any of our tunnels anymore but some of them are out there should we keep going yeah I can show you more it goes further Underground now watch your heads with this one the ceiling slopes down really sharply so we're going down we're going further underground yes because of course as you go further underground it gets even cooler so on those days when it's over 100 degrees Fahrenheit up at ground level you come down here and we have about a 25 degree drop so it's very comfortable down here even in the summertime so 25 degrees Fahrenheit cooler down here yes and so at this point we're about 22 feet below ground level but you don't feel like you're done around you don't feel like you're further underground no it doesn't it's still so open yes and you can feel a little more moisture in the air down here but for the most part yes still very open you can still feel a breeze come through so he was able to keep the Earth from kind of tumbling in by just or it's just the heart pan naturally does that or he was racing as he went it depends uh so some areas it was just the hard pan naturally doing it because sometimes he would find a piece of hard pan that he could just not get through and so he took that as a sign that that is fine on its own he did not need to alter it but if he could break through it then he saw that as an area that would need some extra structural support so that's where he's putting in his stonework so he realized that maybe where he dug this other level is what how far down between 10 and 12 feet depending on where you are okay so we started with 10 and 12 feet and then he thought if I go a little lower I can get something cooler So This was later on this is after he's been doing it for a few decades yeah but yes he's realizing if he goes further underground it's going to be cooler and also I think at this point he just wanted to challenge himself and I see that also in the tree that he planted down here this tree at one time had seven different types of citrus growing on it so I really see this as he's reached the point in his working down here that he's trying to come up with something new and exciting for him to figure out if he can do we definitely see the layers yes clay hard pan hard pens and then all that Target this is all hard pan here okay yeah see how far down the heart is yes it's significant yeah 15 feet the functionality of this level this sort of second floor underground yes right yes minus two yes is just hottest point of summer or heat wave it's a place to come cool off he's not making another home for himself down here it's a single room functionality wise maybe it doesn't make the most sense but it's a new challenge you know it's getting a tree with seven different types of fruit to grow 22 feet underground and making sure that it's getting enough sunlight for that navel orange lemon grapefruit Sweet Lemon Valencia orange sour orange and chedro this is the only one that had seven today there's just the two oranges oh because they're not yeah we lost some of the graphs over the years so you can see where they used to be here so today there's just a Seville orange and Valencia orange on here okay two pretty amazing it lasted a long time but we still have people that come to us and tell us that they were here as children and they've come back now you know 40 50 years later and they remember that there were multiple fruits still on this tree so it did last a long time with all seven fruits keep going yeah yeah it keeps going and in fact this is an interesting another interesting thing he's created so this is what he considered his tri-level aquarium oh now we we use the word aquarium because that's how baldassar referred to it but really up here we just have a little fish pond so he would go fishing in the San Joaquin River and so sometimes he would catch small fish that weren't worth keeping to eat but he would bring them back here he would set them in this little fish pond and he made a room underneath it where he could sit down there and look up at the fish so he was able to keep fish alive down here obviously now you have plastic fish yes at that point he was able to keep him now I don't know how long but but he would bring back what he caught and he'd keep them in here wow yeah just like a little pond experimenting and and that's the thing I feel like once he reached this point he really is is like let's see what else I can do that's what I see him as doing yeah so it just would have been able to look up and see the fish above him and you can feel that temperature drop once again in here I mean this is a wonderful place to sit in the summertime you see that we're two floors below now because yeah you can see it I just saw it yes it's really up there so we're what like 20. this is about 25 feet below ground level now um so this is where he would eat his lunches in the summertime and I think growing up in a Mediterranean environment he probably loved that idea of being able to sit here and just relax we do like to think that he embraced Dolce the sweetness of doing nothing so even though he's you know he's working hard he's creating this home we do see little pieces of his personality coming out where he's looking for places to relax and just enjoy his life and I think this is a perfect example of that this is just a place for him to come sit down enjoy a meal enjoy a glass of wine look at the fish above him I mean it's a nice life expression Dolce the sweetness of doing nothing not a lot of time in his life for that it seems I know he definitely was busy but then I guess you have to have found those moments yes and I like to think about that side of him because you know it would be kind of sad to think if he was just work work work for 40 years but I don't think he was that way I think that he was definitely passionate about what he was creating but he also took time to be with his family to sit down here and just enjoy his life he's playing yes exactly you know this is in the 1930s he started in 1906 so at this point he has reached that point like what else can I do so underground fish yes underground trees underground fireplaces yes and a wine cellar because you need that if you're gonna have the whole underground area you need a wine cellar right you can't leave that behind thanks and you see vegetation everywhere yes continually planted yes and that was a focus for him because at a certain point he was selling that fruit and making his living that way so he did take space to make sure that he was growing those fruits and citrus growing citrus in this kind of weather in this area that people can't are they a citrus is actually fairly common in this area if you get a good piece of land okay that was the tricky thing for baldasar is Citrus has very delicate Roots so it wouldn't be able to handle the hard pan okay and he was unaware of the hard pan so it was really trying to find an environment of getting past the hard pan for them I love it sour oranges well in the sour oranges were a really smart thing to plant because they're a very hearty tree and so he would very often plant sour oranges and then go back and graft other Citrus onto them this you can see just goes straight up does he prune no actually they grow this way because of the exposure they have to the Sun so they just naturally grow straight up like this and they don't put out any limbs because why would you exactly there's there's no sun to get down here you gotta get up there they know yeah nature knows that's a tall orange tree yes yeah so all of our all of our citrus trees are shaped so differently from ones at ground level because of this Skylight system instead of becoming more bushy down towards the bottom they all need to grow up there which actually makes it very convenient for harvesting because you can just walk at ground level and pick the fruit off like a bush I feel like a good move here right it's a nice way to live yeah yeah I'm surprised it didn't Inspire more of his neighbors or more people I think just too much work and it was unconventional I mean we have to think about other people living in this area at that time they were not looking to do something like this yeah not funny we don't want to change even if it's yes even if it makes sense yeah fine so we consider this his Chapel Garden and then we have his area of prayer over here so can we go with the biblical metaphor is this like an underground Garden of Eden or something like that you could you could well you can feel the breeze in here yes coming through so even without the Venturi effect it still comes through yes and a lot of the tunnels are set up in a way to push the air through them and it really transports you if you're very quiet you can hear Highway City out there but it takes you to another world lets you step back into his time I think this is the chapel okay yep so this is where he would have his prayers then his brother took over his brother took over so he never married he actually was a very social man he had a few girlfriends over the years he never found the right lady to come marry him and live down here with him so when he passed away he had no direct descendants but he was very close with his brother Giuseppe and when baldassar passed away Giuseppe tried to preserve as much of as much as he could of baldassar's creation and then above oh so so we have baldistar's Bell up here one it's the chapel so you need to have a bell but practical purpose as well baldusar used this as a doorbell this area will turn you around quite a bit but right up this passageway there's a direct way to ground level again so he made sure that his close friends and his family knew how to come down this passage and ring the bell because you can imagine if they're coming over to see baldasar there's acres and Acres of tunnels it would be near impossible to find him so they would come here and they would ring the bell and baldusar would come meet them we'll go see the Bell yeah in the front door yeah a door yeah there's no front door there's no front door but yeah it would just be right through this way thank you yeah oh but we're still underground you're still underground but see if you come up here there's Shaw Avenue oh so it's kind of a slope yeah so he would make sure that his friends and family they would Shaw was here at the time it was a one-lane road but it was here yeah so they would just come right on Shaw and just walk right down here down that tunnel and ring the bell so here you see that there's some trees but these are partially underground I mean they're yes right does it help it's getting to good soil it is getting to good soil which is why they were planted here but I will say these trees they have had a harder time than the ones that are fully enclosed you also notice that the trunks are very different with these trees they're a lot thicker than the ones that you see that are fully enclosed because they're trying to get more nutrients yeah so the doorbell was so they would walk down here make a left and then there's that big doorbell in the chapel so there would be a rope hanging down there's not a rope coming out here to pull it back it was open yes this was completely open he had no fences so they would just walk right in make a left and go ring the bell is the same way before modern Communications if a town if if there was some trouble somebody would go run exactly the church and ring the bell exactly same model yes coming from the old world but you can see a lot you know he's taking this knowledge he has from his home country and incorporating it here and even that way of sort of living amongst the orchard the feeling of like it's so much more beautiful down in here yes what we see out on the street exactly this is yeah you're living right in nature yeah yeah in a place that's kind of dry and hot and yeah you know it's not there's not forests around here exactly some weird little spots why is that more it's more it just keeps going and going So eventually baldasar got the inspiration of turning this into a day Resort this wasn't something that he ever ended up opening up as a fully functioning business but that was part of his inspiration of continuing to go was he wanted to make Courtyards where people could come underground they could escape the Heat and they would be able to sit and just enjoy a glass of wine enjoy some fruit right off of the tree so this area that we're in right now eventually he wanted it to be a car tunnel because he knew that if he was going to have a resort he needed a way to get people to bring their cars undergrounds and so this tunnel here was intended to be part of a valet service for the resort so you can see that it wasn't finished so he had a lot of Big Ideas unfortunately he did have an untimely death he was only 67 when he passed away he developed a hernia which I think is not too surprising considering how many years of hard labor he had but he went to have surgery on it and it was successful but he got pneumonia while he was in the hospital and so the pneumonias actually what took his life so he had lots of plans for what he wanted to do with it and I think if he had had another 30 years to work down here he probably still would have had big plans you know I think he would have kept going and going as long as he could there's a lot of foresight too we're thinking about cars wet in the 30s yeah in the 20s he was starting this area he had a car so I think he just had in his mind that that's the way of the future and people are going to be having them so we need a place to get them down here the mules yes so um he actually had several different farm animals two mules and he also had a cow he had pigs he had chickens he kept all of them up at ground level some people they'll come out here and visit us and so why did they have to be in the heat but a big Focus for baldasar was that the air would be very fresh down here and of course when you start bringing farm animals underground that's not going to keep the air quite So Fresh So they had structures just like other animals would have had in the area but this area specifically he did use those two fuels to create because he would hook them up to his Fresno scraper so that would be for the larger tunnels like this watch your step here it goes down pretty steeply yeah I know and let your eyes adjust a little bit yeah and then we come out here and we're right back in that car tunnel oh so this is big enough for cars I don't think cars of the time cars of the time because I mean it's definitely meant for model A's model T's narrow and Tall most of our cars would not do very well in this car tunnel and I was mentioning the Fresno scraper before that he'd hook up to his mules his Fresno scraper is actually in here so the Fresno scraper was invented in Fresno but this is the first piece of farming equipment where people were able to excavate more than one shovel full at a time so you would hook one or two mules up to that and just drag it along so this is how he was able to get a lot of dirt out of here oh yes just with animals and then scraping it along the ground and so that would be used for the big projects like the car tunnel now for the smaller spaces something like that is not going to work but something large like this you can excavate a lot more with that yeah yeah so it really stands out with baldosars he's doing this on his own there are other underground places but very often they're done by a team of people this is being done by himself this is a solo place yes wow it's like he's his own uh like Moby Dick like yeah you know his own yeah because this you would almost think of these modern tunneling devices you would think so this was all this is done by hand this is done by hand all of this okay yeah he just scraped it and took it out yes yeah yeah and then it probably would have gone right up that way because that starts head up to ground level so we would have taken it right up there and found a way to repurpose it right it keeps going oh my God so here it's just kind of semi-underground yes but you can feel that temperature change coming here it's quite a bit warmer in this spot it is but once again this is more for the cars so he's probably not quite as focused on temperature wise and more focused on keeping the air fresh he just kept going so he's just gonna keep digging so I think so so this area actually heads up to ground level and that's where he was planning to have a parking lot for the day Resort okay so the idea was the cars would drive all the way back there any out of space for a parking lot and is that a chimney that's a chimney to our Ballroom which was the final project he was working on before he passed away I do believe that if he had had more years he would have just kept going but the ballroom was what he was working on uh before he went to have that surgery on the hernia and the ballroom was also for that Resort idea he wanted to be able to have a space where people could have weddings and parties currently under restoration and he didn't finish it so you're going to notice it looks quite a bit different than the other areas you've seen oh my gosh if he was doing this kind of modern so he started it he excavated the room itself so that alone is a huge feat 3 500 square feet that he excavated and all of this he excavated and if you look around the room you'll see some of his stone work so he started the stonework he passed away before he was able to finish it so this room just sat here until Giuseppe was able to take over this piece of land and then it was finished by Giuseppe and his family yeah these are baldistar's tools up here and you'll see if you look at the shovels I mean I'm sure he went he went through many of them over the years oh wow just standard shovels just standard shovels standard pickaxes so the pickaxe was probably really important though oh yes yes that was huge because most people use Dynamite to get through hardpan baldusar didn't want to use Dynamite for two reasons one he wanted to reuse the stone so if you blast it out you're not going to get usable Stone um but two he didn't once he started creating he didn't want to affect the rest of his structures so he's doing it by hand and then he would just put things into these wheelbarrows he'd put things in the wheelbarrows and haul the wheelbarrows up to ground level once he started making friends in the community he would accept help with pushing the wheelbarrows up to ground level because that's one of those laborous tasks that he didn't necessarily need to be doing that and living in this area through times like the Great Depression he very often would try to help other families in the community by giving them work to do and then he could pay them with fruit that he was growing more other food that he was creating here so all we see here there is there is a plant yes so this was actually done in the 1940s and this is here because of all the excavation that he did underground once he got past the hard pan he was able to find a good soil that he could use for planting and he moved it up here and built the topsoil up so much that eventually he planted these so these are his trees they're much younger than the ones underground that were planted in the early 1900s but they are his okay and this right here was his original house no this is actually from a World War II Airfield oh yes so um history later down the line um So eventually his brother ended up taking it over after baldassar passed away and there were a few areas that needed to be finished off at the same time we had a World War II Airfield called Hammer Airfield they were auctioning off the buildings his brother bought some of the buildings uh to finish off some of the areas baldassar had been working on so there is a little bit above ground a little bit and it just happens to be a an Old World War II Airfield this happens to be yeah okay is that something oh yes so this is one of those Arch forms I was telling you about that he would create he would just create them with parts that he would find scrap metal and then prop them up and build the arch around it passed away land was sold off by family over the years and as you can see the city has moved in on us so we have preserved what we can yeah you were mentioning so there's a rumor that one of his rooms is on the property where the Carl's Jr is today and then as we get a little closer to our property there's some hotels on the other side of the hotels there's a small neighborhood and those we do know some of the houses have a rumor two of his in their yards and they just covered them up with boards they don't use them they don't use them they just have boards over them and none of it has caved in no we've actually never dealt with any collapses that was baldusar's well a well underground is actually makes sense right well yeah because you're Excavating anyway so from this point it's about 10 feet below ground level and then it's excavated another 40 feet down oh so at that point that was enough for this to be a functional well for him and you're right by his home so that's a convenient place to have your water well right you just go over and get your water we've been in a lot of cave homes that would that feel like caves but this doesn't feel like you're you never yes forget where the light is light and air and it feels really yeah more than a Helm because of the amount of uses you find around here is almost like a little village yes it feels it feels more than the office yes Gardens yes Chapel place to cook let's just leave the place to hang out with your family yeah exactly and that's the thing with baldosaurus he was very social he had a heart for people he wanted to share this with people and in fact on Sundays he welcomed visitors to come see him and he would just walk them around and show them what he was creating so this was not intended to be something where he's just sequestering himself alone underground he wanted to share it with others this is one of the areas he brought in a strawberry tree to attract birds so this was an area that he was hoping to have visitors come and relax this must be a really old one the Grapevine yes yeah the Grapevine was planted very early on in the early 1900s over 100 years old and it still produces grapes and this is one of his grafted trees you'll see both oranges and lemons growing up here he did like experimenting with grafting we used to have quite a few more grafted trees but over the years some of them have just lost their graphs because he wanted to be able to have lots of variety exactly because that's the best way to get you know more fruit in the same space just craft them onto the same tree it's really dreamy I mean yeah trees here and you can just pop a fruit in your mouth you're underground it's cool it's just it's just it's a lovely way to live you know when you really put yourself in his shoes yes he's working hard to create this but doesn't that bring so much more value to it that he's creating the home that he wants for himself and he didn't really see any limits it seems mm-hmm I don't think so I think once he figured it out the only limitation was his own abilities you know he had 80 acres to work within this is not a time where he had to get permits to create these things I mean he could just wake up one morning and go and create an idea he was getting a lot from the land he had bought by mistake in the end that turned out to be like an opportunity for exploration yes exactly and we kind of see it as he took the lemons that life gave him and he made limoncello he made something just very different and creative and very unique in a way that he never saw his life going this way but you know if things had worked out well where he had gotten this good piece of land and he had grown his Citrus we wouldn't be here today it would just be more of Highway City and instead he created this thing that we have this Legacy of people still coming today to hear about him his nephew Rick used to say that he wasn't limited by conventional wisdom many people would have been faced with this obstacle and would have thought well I'm done I'm just gonna have to work as a laborer the rest of my life and and he was not that type of person he was someone who thought about it and found a unique way to overcome that challenge foreign do you need to tell people especially

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 2,276,892

Keywords: underground city, underground village, underground home, underground gardens, underground orchard, forestiere underground gardens, baldassare forestiere, handdug home, handdug gardens, subterranean city, subterranean home, subterranean gardens, subterranean orchard, extreme weather home, personal building odyssey, fresno, california, underground aquarium, underground chapel, underground fish pond, subterranean aquarium, venturi effect, natural cooling, bioclimatic home

Id: mUKRPoQKynk

Length: 45min 53sec (2753 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 11 2023