Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A ruined neighbour in america

built to keep the peace.

This is a really violent situation,

they want better conditions, they want fairer pay,

they want better housing.

An ancient ghost town in Russia that still shows traces of life.

There's people's belongings left behind

as if they had just left recently.

A beachside resort in Croatia

caught up in a bitter conflict.

So, this place has got evidence of large calibre rounds

being fired in to it

which some people might call a war crime.

And a fantastical world hidden in the Mexican jungle.

You see heads, hands sticking out of the ground,

stuff that looks like snakes.

It's almost like some playground designed by doctor Zeus.

Decaying relics...

Shadows of lost worlds...

Ruins haunted by the past,

their secrets waiting to be revealed.

(Theme music)

In the American town of Campbell, Ohio,

one neighbourhood looks different from the rest.

Well, the first glance

you wouldn't think anything different of this place,

you've got some nice green areas,

you've got some residential housing, and so on,

but you know, most of the houses seem to be empty.

You can see that there had been some colour on them,

but now it's faded and chipped away.

This is a place that really looks like

it's seen better days,

that it once used to just be full of activity, full of people.

And now, it just looks impoverished and just neglected.

But there's something else

that's not quite right about these homes.

They all look the same inside, it almost looks industrial.

So, it's at odds with what you'd expect for that particular area.

These strangely uniform houses are marked by traces of protest.

Something is happened here.

It's not what it once was and you can't help but wonder

what happened to make it reach the state that it's in today.

Tim sokoloff first came here as a teenager.

It was really a hot mess of abandonment.

Most of what we're seeing now you

couldn't see, it was overgrown,

there were trees and brush everywhere.

Beneath the undergrowth,

Tim found the houses were unusually distinctive.

Everything was minimalistic.

You know, there was no cabinets, cupboards.

This was it, you had a sink and a shelf.

This was your fuse box,

it's a Frankenstein switch

with two fuses that ran the whole apartment.

And here, you know, we've got original bathroom...

And pipes all exposed,

toilet with a tank that had connection,

the tanks are actually made to the walls.

And everybody looks here and says,

well, how you take a bath in that tub?

You know, little 4 foot tub, cast iron.

Eventually this neighbourhood became home to great poverty.

And at number 50 chamber street, things took a tragic turn.

Two brothers lived in this apartment,

they didn't have their water turned on

'cause they didn't want to pay a water bill.

They would go dumpster diving for food.

And at one point in time a neighbour would come over

and knocked on the door

and when the one brother opened the door

there were legs sticking out from behind the door

because the other brother had just passed away

and he just, you know...

Had him lay there.

Although the area had declined dramatically

by the time the brother died,

it didn't start out that way.

These are the sheet and tube company homes.

Their story began

with the establishment of a steel mill

in neighbouring youngstown.

Youngstown sheet and tube

was one of the great iron and steel companies of the day.

Remember, it's coming about just as the industrial revolution

is growing in the United States.

But it goes on in the 20th century

to become larger than Coca-Cola,

larger than heinz,

larger than Johnson & Johnson.

It becomes the fifth largest steel company in the United States

and the largest employer in youngstown.

But in 1915 the company hit it's first major challenge.

Europe was in the grips of the world war I,

and American industry was straining to make materials for battle.

The world war I has a really interesting impact

on industry in the United States.

It ramps up demand

and so it's actually good for business.

I mean, if you think about it, if you're making steel and iron,

war is when demand's at its greatest,

for the manufacturing industry it's a boom time.

It was so good for business

that youngstown sheet and tube could barely keep up with the demand.

But while the company was making money hand over fist

its employees were facing a very different kind of battle.

Working conditions for these steel workers

was not good.

And then everything gets speeded up when the war begins,

the workers are expected to do more and to work over time.

There was no union yet.

There was no... there was problems.

And they weren't really trying to pay the guys

what they should be paying them.

So, there's a lot of descent that started to build.

Low pay and bad conditions created a volatile situation,

one that was about to boil over.

In December 1915, 500 employees walk out.

They put down their tools, they want better conditions,

they want fairer pay, they want better housing.

The labour strike continued for weeks

and it was not always peaceful.

The strikers were serious.

They didn't just walk off,

they were going to engage

in whatever tactics they needed to... to advance their case.

And they are so much about business

and so serious that the company ends up hiring armed guards

to protect their interests and their property.

After the new year, events came to a head.

On January 7, 1916, the strikers along with their wives

march up Wilson Avenue to meet a group of scab workers,

who were coming in to try to take their jobs.

That's when things get out of hand.

We're not sure who took the first shot,

if it was one of the guards at the steel mill

or if it was one of the people in the crowd

but a shot was fired and a riot broke out.

People rioted, they looted some of the buildings,

burnt things, and so on.

And the next day, on the 8th the home guard had to be called in

to calm things down

and many of the workers were arrested and jailed.

This is youngstown sheet and tube hospital.

For some guys it saved their life

by getting right here to the hospital

before they could bleed out

or, you know, their injury took their life.

The riot was a blood bath.

By the time the dust had settled

125 people are injured and 3 people are dead.

Tensions between employer and employee

were at an all-time high.

So, the company made an offer.

The mill workers rioted and burned the city to the ground.

And the mill said, this is not conducive to our business model,

we can't have this, let's build them some nice homes

that they can live in that

will be, give them a better standard of living.

The housing was going to be connected to electricity.

It was going to have running water

and so it was going to provide workers with amenities

that were not yet fully standard in the United States.

The buildings were sold as homes of the future.

But with the company's eye on the bottom line,

these houses would have to be built on the cheap.

They came up with an ingenious way of doing that

by building essentially prefabricated units.

They were going to construct houses,

one next to each other that were all the same.

When this apartment complex was created

it stood for everything america stood for,

strong, innovative, powerful.

You know, this was the epitome of modern building technology.

Entire walls were cast in low-cost concrete.

When they arrived on site

they were assembled like flat packed furniture.

The buildings went together, so when they put the next slab in,

it slid right in there in to that one

like a lock in place kind of lego.

And here's a section of wall,

this was actually standing up against here

when I first came here

and eventually fell over on to the ground.

And when it hit the ground it's so heavy

that we heard it all the way up in to the union square park.

You expect cars to come off of a production line not houses,

but here they'd flip that around

and they were literally producing

house after house after house after house,

very quickly, very cheaply.

But in doing so also creating a community

that was desirable for the workers to want to go and move in.

The new homes put an end to the strike action.

But that meant that youngstown were both employer

but also landlord.

So, when something was gonna go wrong

things were gonna go badly wrong.

The company and the neighbourhood prospered for 60 years.

But on 19th of September, 1977 the steel mill closed down.

Overnight 5,000 people lost their jobs,

it's still known as black Monday.

And this has a huge ripple effect in the community.

And when black Monday happens

it's sort of the first in a series of plant shutdowns.

And so you have this depopulation

that starts to happen in the late '70s and in to the '80s

when you think about the decline of the rust belt.

That's exactly what this moment is.

Over the next few decades the sheet and tube company homes

slowly emptied and fell in to disrepair.

Since the 1990s most of the prefab homes have lay rotting and empty,

but Tim is bringing them back from the brink.

We just started a couple of years ago renovating apartments

to try to bring the complex back to life.

And this is one that we renovated,

it's finished, and people are just moving in here today

as a matter of fact.

This was a modern marvel of building and engineering technology.

And it has a lot of history here for our mills and for our nation.

It's important to save it.

It could bring... it could help bring back to town,

it's our diamond in the rough.

In the highlands of central Mexico

lies a fantastical world hidden by dense rainforest.

We are in the heart of this untouched beauty in the mountains.

And everywhere you look you are just surrounded by this canopy

that is the jungle.

Then as you drop down beneath the canopy

you realise that there are these strange structures

dotted all around.

These remains are difficult to date.

There are some things that look almost like Mayan ruins,

others that look strangely modern.

Deeper in the forest things get even stranger.

There are fantastical pillars and stairs to nowhere.

There's a library with no books and a cinema with no seats.

You see heads and hands sticking out of the ground,

stuff that looks like snakes.

It's almost like some playground designed by doctor Zeus.

What kind of people left behind these bizarre traces?

There just doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason

for its existence.

I mean, what are all these structures?

And what the heck are they doing in the middle of the jungle?

Who would put in so much effort, so much time, so much money

to create this fantasy land?

Zaira linan is the director of this curious place

which dates back to the 1940s.

Las pozas sits in a densely forested region

of Mexico's San Luis potosi state.

And it was this lush exotic environment

that lured its creator here from a very different world.

Edward James was born in 1907 to a British American family,

a very wealthy family.

And he was a true British aristocrat.

His godfather was actually king Edward vii,

and there were even rumours that he was his illegitimate son.

Edward was still quite young when his father died

and left him with this big fortune.

Armed with his huge inheritance,

he soon spread his wings and left war torn britain behind.

In the early 1940s he was drawn to Los Angeles.

At the time Los Angeles was a real hot bed for all kinds of immigrates,

people who had fled the war in Europe.

Eventually, he fell in with a group that you might call bohemians

or they were almost like proto-hippies.

While he was living in la,

James decided he wanted to create a retreat

that could pull him away

from the bustling of every day city life.

He wanted to create his very own garden of Eden.

Edward James's obsession with exotic flowers

led him to Mexico.

The orchid is in some way the most sensuous of plants,

and that appealed to James's sensibility.

Las pozas was the perfect place

to indulge his passion for this plant.

Las pozas started off as just two simple huts being built,

because James wanted to focus his attention on the orchids.

He devoted himself

to cultivating these thousands and thousands of orchids

across his big plot.

James threw himself in to this project

and it really bordered on obsession.

But the nurturing climate of las pozas

was about to deal Edward James a devastating blow.

James was away on a trip

when a freak cold snap hit the central highlands of Mexico,

and that period of cold weather

destroyed his entire collection of orchids.

When returning from a trip to New York,

he was confronted with a very unpleasant surprise.

You can imagine James just discovering this devastation,

it must have been absolutely crushing.

But the catastrophe pushed him to create

something even more extraordinary.

This time, James decided he was going to create

his version of the garden of Eden

but with concrete structures

that couldn't be destroyed by freak weather.

But Edward James didn't stop at stone flowers,

he soon began to indulge his other obsession.

James came of age at a time when some of the most exciting work

happening in the arts was the movement of surrealism.

This was the idea of artists trying to get in touch

with something deeper,

something from your subconscious.

He had been friends with famous surrealist artists

like Salvador dali.

And after the loss of his orchids,

he retreated in to a surreal fantasy world.

He created all kinds of fantastical shapes,

everything was as if it just emerged out of some kind of dream.

This garden was constantly evolving

with ever larger

and ever more bizarre concrete structures being added.

The sculptural garden really defied all architectural labels.

It...

Became this reality of his surrealist thought.

The surrealist structures surround the garden's nine pools.

He puts seats there but no screen, he was having fun.

James gave these structures

really kind of unique and whimsical names,

like the house with three storeys that might actually be five.

At one point he mentioned something about

imagine if people in the future

come in and finding these shapes in the jungle,

like they were some ancient Mayan ruins or something like that.

And I think that delighted him that having people say,

"what the heck is this?"

For himself, Edward James built a house,

a studio and a sarcophagus.

And he found refuge in his garden at las pozas until his death.

James died in 1984,

and you can imagine this spectacular space

just being reclaimed by the jungle

and being kind of lost and forgotten,

a bit the way he might have imagined.

The garden is a masterpiece

and a testament to one man's eccentricity

and his desire to be extraordinary.

Today a dedicated foundation

takes care of Edward James's surrealist vision

in the way he'd intended.

What's so charming about this space

is in a way the jungle is allowed to grow up

and surround some of the structures.

In Russia's dagestan region,

an eerie ruin hides on a mountain peak.

It's high up in the craggy rocks,

looking down on the eagles soaring below, and it's hard to make out.

It's almost impossible to believe

that anyone could have a town in this place.

But someone once eked out an existence here.

All around it are terraced fields fading in to the distance.

Some people call this the machu picchu of the caucasus,

and you can really see why.

But why did people come here?

Why did people settle here, why?

Among the ruins lie hints of a conflicted past.

There's people's belongings left behind

as if they had just left recently.

It looks like a town, but there is no movement,

no vehicles, no people.

And it is a ghost town.

Local conservationist zaur tsokolov

is keen to preserve the deserted settlement of gamsutl'.

At the end of the 20th century gamsutl' was still inhabited.

Zaur remembers its last resident...

A bee keeper.

For thousands of years

zaur's ancestors lived in this brutal terrain.

This is a part of the world which has a history dominated

by warring tribes...

And people who feel endangered.

Dagestan has long been a geopolitical flashpoint.

Dagestan is 19,000 square miles,

it has a population of about 3.1 million

but it's a very, very diverse area.

The people who lived in gamsutl'

belonged to a tribe of elite highland warriors

known as the avars.

And there are signs of conflict everywhere.

The position of gamsutl'

is another sure sign

that this was once a heavily contested battle ground.

From here, from this eagles nest,

with its series of watchtowers and drawbridges

and above all visibility,

this was a place that really could be defended.

And the avars watchfulness would soon be called upon.

Originally the dagestan region

lay between the Christian and Muslim worlds.

By the 18th century the domineering islamic persian empire

wanted to take control of villages like gamsutl'.

And with the war mongering leader nader shah

at the head of the mighty persian armies,

it seemed like nothing could stop them.

Nader shah is seeking to expand the territory

that he controls and the area from which he can draw revenue

and he does that by fighting and continuously fighting.

He's sometimes called the Napoleon of persia.

Nader shah was determined to take control of dagestan.

But the persians underestimated the skill of the avar warriors

and their new leader Ibrahim of urada.

Ibrahim was a larger than life character.

He was aggressive, he was provocative.

He was a formidable military and political leader.

The first problem Ibrahim faced though was not the persian armies,

but how to stop the avar warriors fighting between themselves.

What he's got to be able to do is build a coalition...

Who are willing to put aside their constant state

of intern signed warfare

and join in common cause

to resistant persian domination.

Against the odds,

Ibrahim of urada managed to convince the squabbling highlanders

to create a united front.

There were penalties for not cooperating with this agreement.

So, for example, if a village failed to contribute,

they were fined 100 sheep, which is significant in this period.

In the end he assembled an army of 11,000 men

ready to face the tsar.

In 1741 the bloodshed began.

When the war was finally fought,

it erupted across a front that was tens of miles long.

But more important than numbers of troops in an area like this

is familiarity and intimacy with the terrain,

and the dagestani's had that.

Ibrahim and his tribes

have a massive home field advantage.

The unlikely confederation of avars

took nader shah by surprise.

Rumour has it

that he left his vast treasures of campaign gold

here in the mountains

and there are still treasure hunters who come looking for it.

Following his victory, Ibrahim became famous as a Muslim scholar

while nader shah was later assassinated by his own people.

The avars survived in gamsutl' for the next 200 years...

Until the Russian communists arrived in the 20th century.

The dagestani region

becomes an autonomous Soviet republic

within the larger Soviet union.

The Soviets did their best to quash the avars fighting spirit

but in the end it was nature that won out.

It's simply too isolated

and people leave slowly over time,

until in the end there was just one person left.

And he died in 2015.

Today zaur is determined that the ruins of gamsutl',

which embody the avar warriors spirit should live on.

Croatia's glittering dalmatian coast is crammed with tourist resorts,

but one stands out.

The building's form this ghostly backdrop

to what should be a picture postcard holiday spot.

It's really quite unsettling.

We've got a tourist mecca

nearby, this ought to be prime real estate.

An eclectic collection of ruins follow the shoreline.

Each building is very different in style.

From brutal concrete corridors and square solid rooms

to these beautiful stunning curves

and elaborate archways.

You can still sort of detect the original furnishings,

the wallpaper, these beautiful staircases.

The grand old building at the heart of the complex

looks the most exclusive.

This facility has got bars, and restaurants,

and courtyards.

Then you have these more modern hotels

built in the 1960s, '70s, and even '80s built

at clearly a tremendous expense

that have all been just left to rot.

But there are signs that the luxury here was shattered.

This place has got evidence

of large calibre rounds being fired in to it

which some people might call a war crime.

These obliterated buildings

were witness to one of the bloodiest conflicts

of 20th century Europe.

This place is a living time capsule,

from a period in this nation's history

that has definitely not been forgotten.

Jure maric is a history professor who grew up in the town of kupari.

Back then kupari was one of Croatia's most exclusive resorts

and the grand was its first hotel.

Investors come here

and they build a big gorgeous hotel.

It's going to be a first-rate hotel,

it's got a beautiful view over the adriatic sea.

It's easily accessible by railroad from anywhere in Europe.

This place is gonna make a mint.

The grand hotel, you know, was incredibly ornate,

spiral staircase up to the upper floors,

you know, these beautiful rooms,

great views across the sea.

So, this was quite the impressive tourist destination.

The 139-room hotel kick started a trend,

and for the next two decades,

holiday makers flocked to kupari.

But the good times wouldn't last for long.

World war ii stopped tourism in this town,

but it wasn't the end of it for good.

It was about to get a second wind and on a far greater scale.

After the war, Croatia joined forces with neighbouring Serbia,

it's long-time rival.

Along with three other Balkan states they formed socialist yugoslavia...

Led by the communist josip tito.

Tito has to assure the loyalty of the military.

The serb controlled Yugoslav army in order to maintain the communist

hold on yugoslavia.

So, he decides among other things to create a holiday resort at kupari

for the yugoslavian army.

Quickly hotels started popping up all along this coastline,

huge brutalist blocks, iconic of the communist era.

In 1978, tito's forces build the Jewel in the resorts crown,

the hotel kupari.

Tito spent

more than half a billion dollars in today's money

to create this exclusive resort.

And under his rule the resort thrived

and the sparring Yugoslav states remained united.

Tito's communist powers forced a tentative peace on this region

for nearly 40 years.

Tito, of course, was the glue that held together

this incredibly fractious country called yugoslavia,

but tito dies in 1980.

After tito's death the fault lines began to show.

And in 1991 the collapse of the Soviet union coincided

with the rise of another ruthless Serbian leader...

Slobodan milosevic.

But Croatians like jure's family were demanding independence.

The Serbs, of course, oppose this attempt of these nations

to break away and so a civil war breaks out in 1991.

This spot becomes fought over between the Serbs

and the croats and it gets very nasty.

Kupari is just six miles down the coast

from the strategically vital Croatian city of Dubrovnik,

which milosevic's Serbian-led forces

were determined to take.

These attacks and bombings began in the city,

it became known as the siege of Dubrovnik.

They tried to pound the Croatian's into submission

by shelling the beautiful ancient croat city of Dubrovnik.

And just nearby there's kupari.

During this time a small Croatian force holes up in kupari.

So, you know, fight the Serbian blockade

and try to attack the Serbian artillery positions,

so then, of course, the Serbs turn their guns on kupari

and they shell it for six months.

The Serbian-led assault was merciless.

Kupari's grand hotel took the greatest hit.

The resort was absolutely devastated.

And then when the Serbian infantry came in to clear the croats out,

they cleared them with phosphorus grenades, burning them out entirely,

leaving the place

essentially a gutted ruin on a beautiful stretch of coastline.

It seemed mad that they'd completely destroy

what they themselves had built,

but they were determined to make sure

there was nothing left for the croats.

By the end of the bombardment,

this was no longer a habitable place.

It took just 2 weeks for the Serbian-led forces

to recapture the coastline.

They destroyed 2,000 homes in the process.

The Serbian-led occupation of kupari lasted until may 1992,

when the Croatians finally took it back.

Serbian leader slobodan milosevic died in 2006

while standing trial for war crimes.

And the decimated resort of kupari has still not recovered.

The level of devastation here is horrifying,

and it's basically sat like that ever since.

But good news, the site has been bought by investors

and there's plans to redevelop it as a great beach resort.

(Music)

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV