Original subtitles

[narrator] Abandoned structures hold the secrets of America's past.

A stop on Route 66 reveals a forgotten story of this nation's Mother Road.

Whatever color, whatever race,

where we learned how to treat people with great respect.

[narrator] A scorched landscape conceals

a revolutionary entertainment complex.

All you wanted to do is run up the hill.

All right? For young guys, this was something you'd never seen before.

[narrator] And one man's extraordinary feat

of architecture speaks to this nation's pioneer spirit.

[Sunny] America is absolutely come here,

live free, build your dreams.

Anything is possible.

I mean, have you ever seen anything like this?

[narrator] Scattered across the United States are abandoned structures,

forgotten ruins of the past,

monuments to a bygone era,

each shines a light on the story of this land and its people.

These are the secrets of Hidden America.

Two hours, northeast of Los Angeles, in the Mojave Desert,

lies an eye-catching collection of structures

that are a slice of American entertainment history.

[Alexis] You've got this one-dimensional,

you know, pretty plain desert landscape

and then just this explosion of bright color.

It's clearly a hotspot for graffiti artists 'cause it's everywhere.

[narrator] Graffiti isn't the only reason people visit today.

Some people come for a higher adrenaline activity.

[John] We've had a lot of people who've come through and trespassed,

all had buggies, much like the ones behind me.

And so that kind of is what sparked the idea.

[Rob] The Mad Max-style desert surroundings and all the graffiti,

looks like a perfect place for it.

[narrator] A proper racetrack is set to be built among the ruins,

a new chapter in this site's storied history.

[John] This site is historic for everybody in the area.

Everybody knows what it is.

[narrator] It was the first of its kind in the whole of America,

but the good times didn't last.

[Alexis] Kind of makes you wonder,

"Did something dramatic or sort of terrible happen that closed it?"

It's... it's a little bit of a mystery.

[narrator] The site owes its existence to a piece

of infrastructure built years before.

It wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the road.

I mean, it's the lifeblood of the place.

[Corina] Interstate 15 cuts right through this area,

and it's one of those freeways that has seen a substantial increase

in traffic since its opening in the '50s.

[Rob] You've got these absolutely massive billboards

and you can imagine the name of the park up there in huge letters,

enticing passing traffic to stop and come in.

[narrator] Steve Steiner was a teenager living in Los Angeles

when he made his first journey here.

First trip, my buddy said, "This is going to be something you've never seen before."

He said, "It's a long drive, but come on out."

[Steve] This was in 1978,

and Billy was driving his little 1963 VW bus

that did about 55 miles an hour on the freeway, tops.

So we left Long Beach, and two hours later, here we were,

and it was like nothing I'd ever seen before.

It was a true oasis in the middle of the desert.

[narrator] This is the Lake Dolores Waterpark,

the first water park to be built in America.

What you're looking at is a critical piece

of American entertainment history.

[narrator] But back in the early '60s,

when it first opened, it looked very different.

used to This area usedto be a family campground.

It was this lovely picture postcard, quaint sort of place.

This was first thing in the park, manmade lake.

It's about 27 acres with about five acres of land.

That's an island.

[narrator] Dr. Uppal is part of a group redeveloping the park.

[Gagan] Built in 1960s by a gentleman named Bob Byers.

He named this lake after his wife, Dolores.

So everybody driving on this highway,

seeing this huge body of water,

would make them excited and want to come here

and build memories with their families.

[narrator] The lake was a huge hit

but Bob had dreams of something more

and began taking the first steps in creating

an attraction Americans had never experienced before.

The park's owner was thinking about

different ways to make the space more popular,

and a few simple slides that would fling people

into the lake was just that sort of thing.

So the first slides were made of steel,

and they weren't that long, they weren't that high,

but they were hugely popular,

a fact that was not lost on the owner and kind of got him thinking.

[Rob] Bob realized this was the way to go,

to make the slides the main attraction

and to make them bigger and more extreme.

[narrator] By the 1970s, Lake Dolores had come to resemble

what we now recognize as a water park.

[Rob] A lazy river, a huge slide that started at a crazy height.

These are the hallmarks of the modern water park.

And this was the place that kicked that whole trend off.

[narrator] Steve can vividly recall walking through

the turnstiles for the first time.

When I first got here, it was the parking and lots of cars.

There were a lot of cars back then.

And then it was a mass of people in water.

Incredible. It was a Disneyland for water.

They had six to eight slides that were about 50 meters long,

I would say, and they'd be doing 45 miles an hour,

maybe 50 down this hill.

[Alexis] It's kind of the Wild West,

they did whatever they wanted.

And I cannot be more clear.

You would not see this today.

[narrator] There was one slide that was undoubtedly the star attraction.

[Steve] It's been a long time but I believe we're at the site.

One of the scariest things in my life.

There was two chutes going down this way.

Two hundred feet, at 40 miles an hour, standing up.

So this attraction, this epic slide,

is actually extremely dangerous.

Your first time down is the nuttiest thing

because it's as slick as can be.

And of course, I went down this slide,

ended up down, cut it with a hand,

and then kind of did a... belly flop right into the water.

Got a lot of laughs.

Yeah, I mean, you might be going around,

you might get a little bumped, a little bruised.

But, you know, you would get up,

you would dust yourself off, and go again.

[Steve] Towards the end, one of the greatest feelings of my life.

I went down and everyone's looking at me,

and I was... I spin all the way down the ride,

all the way down to the end and flipped and actually made a nice flip.

It looked great. Never did it again.

[narrator] Other parks soon took notice of Lake Dolores's success,

especially in a well-known city nearby.

[Alexis] Being on the road to Vegas was sort of

a blessing and a curse, right?

In the beginning, great, brings lots of people.

But Vegas being Vegas,

you know, they also started building waterparks and they did them bigger,

uh, more extravagant.

And, you know, in the end, Lake Dolores just couldn't compete with that.

[narrator] A significant downturn in popularity

forced the park to close in the late '80s, but in the next decade,

it finally got the million-dollar makeover it desperately needed.

A dramatic event, however, would ruin the park's chance of a second life.

[narrator] In 1998, the once-revolutionary Lake Dolores Waterpark

reopened under a new name, Rock-A-Hoola.

[Gagan] It was coming back to life.

They brought it back. There were rides there.

Red, white, and blue, American representation rides.

People were still starting to come in,

and it didn't pan out the way they had decided.

There was an unfortunate incident

that also happened in that era.

[narrator] Less than a year after the waterpark had reopened, tragedy struck.

[Gagan] There were certain rides that were still not regulated properly.

They were grandfathered in from the previous era.

What we know about the accident is that it was off duty.

It was off hours.

So an employee, rumored to be under the influence of alcohol,

decided to take a late-night ride,

went down a slide into an underfilled catch pool

and had a pretty disastrous landing.

Severely injured, ended up being a paraplegic.

The lawsuit that followed was just too costly for the park owners.

They were forced to file for bankruptcy.

[Rob] The park changed owners multiple times in the early 2000s,

but only really operated intermittently.

Each owner struggling to keep it alive.

The water park finally shut its doors in 2004, and it's never reopened again.

[narrator] Without the desert groundwater being pumped to the surface,

the lake slowly dried up,

but the water park's abandonment paved the way for a new type of business.

I've been involved with the filming on this property for years,

bringing film crews over, doing different commercials, uh, movies.

[narrator] John Miller runs a film location company

specializing in the Mojave Desert region.

But recently, trespassers gave him a new idea.

A racing track for off-road vehicles.

[John] What we did is we let the market tell us what it wanted from this area.

Like, "Well, hey.

If they're already coming here to do this, why don't we, uh, just build it for them?"

[Corina] An abandoned space like this in the desert

would make a really cool racetrack.

I could totally see dune buggy drivers having an amazing time

in this incredible landscape.

[narrator] As well as the race track,

there are also plans for a virtual reality experience,

an RV park and a hotel.

For the first time in decades, the park now looks like it has a bright future.

[narrator] The Lake Dolores Waterpark began with one man

and his dream, to build something Americans had never seen before.

Decades later, there's at least one person who remains grateful.

Bob Byers, he went out and just did this for fun

for his family and then fun for everybody that came by here.

And for someone to do that, it takes a lot of hard effort, a lot of drive.

And he put pride into something that was just so amazing,

and on behalf of everyone that went here,

I really would love to thank him.

[narrator] On the outskirts of Yellowstone National Park, deep in outlaw country,

is a structure that celebrates the supreme freedom of the American West.

[Rob] Wyoming is a state of natural beauty,

mainly known for its vast expanses of wilderness,

not for its interesting architecture.

[narrator] Yet there is a building here that's hard to ignore.

[Sunny] I've talked to a lot of people throughout the years,

and it's an extreme curiosity.

Nobody knows what it is but they'll take every stab in the world

to try to decipher it.

[Rob] Strange-looking buildings

often have fairly strange stories attached to them.

This is no exception.

[narrator] It was hand-built by a talented and ambitious man.

[Lucy] He was determined to build something

extraordinary for himself and his family.

You can see that it's been made with real care and skill.

This is sort of an alternative Western version of the American dream.

[narrator] But it doesn't have a happy ending.

His unwavering dedication to this building ultimately cost him his life.

[narrator] In this rugged part of America,

embracing the wilderness has a long and celebrated history.

The nearest town, Cody, was named after Buffalo Bill,

the legendary hunter and entrepreneur

whose real name was William Frederick Cody.

[narrator] Twenty miles west of the town is a structure

that matches this wild and dramatic scenery, the Smith Mansion.

When I come driving down the highway

and see the mansion up on the hill,

you can see it five miles down, I get excited.

I can't wait to be here.

[narrator] Sunny Larsen is a mother of two living in Cody.

But back when she was a child, the Smith Mansion was her home.

[Sunny] So this is the cold room of the house.

It's a room that constantly has air running through here.

This room, we slept in during the summertime when it was warm.

This hammock is what we slept on.

[narrator] The ground floor was a wooden maze

comprising of six different shaped rooms.

Okay. So here you are in the hot room.

Uh, this is the hub of the house

where we pretty much did everything.

This was our only source of heat.

And this was our dining room table.

We spent our winters here, and we slept in sleeping bags and roll-outs on the floor.

We didn't have traditional beds.

[narrator] Sunny sold the house in 2019 and hasn't been back since.

Coming back to the house now that I don't live here,

I no longer own it, it's extremely emotional.

It's just something that, um, I'm happy to...

to do to be able to come back up here and see it.

[narrator] The house is named in honor of its builder,

Sunny's father, Francis Lee Smith.

[Sunny] This place actually speaks to my dad's character.

He was what you would consider an old-time mountain man, and he was very eccentric.

And you can kind of see that in the whimsical nature of this home.

[Lucy] This was the house that Francis Lee Smith was very passionate about,

but actually what ended up happening is that it seemed to take over his life.

[narrator] In the beginning, it was a simple story

of a father building a small family cabin for his wife and children.

[Sunny] My dad primarily built the mansion with his own two hands.

He would bring the logs in here.

He'd pull them down into the bottom part of the cold room

using all these handmade pulley systems that he used.

[narrator] Francis Lee Smith was a man of limited resources,

but he knew how to maximize

what he could get his hands on.

For instance, he used timber that had been fire-damaged

in the forest to actually build the base of the building.

He used the wooden floor from a high school gymnasium

and other bits of random timber that he'd find around town.

[narrator] He became laser-focused on the build,

a fact his ex-wife, Linda Mills, knows only too well.

Lee worked in town at his regular job, normal hours,

come home, and then he would work at the house,

on the house to like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.

And this was day after day after day.

[narrator] The marriage ended in divorce,

and Francis Lee moved into the then one-storey Smith Mansion.

This is when Sunny started spending half her childhood here.

[Sunny] We didn't have running water.

We were on minimal electricity.

You know, we had an extension cord that we branched off from.

We didn't have an outhouse.

We lived wild with the animals.

We lived like we were back in the 1800s.

[narrator] The divorce proved to be a pivotal moment for the half-built house.

It started out as a family home,

and then it took on a life of its own and just started going up.

[Lucy] This one floor became two floors, became many floors,

became a separate section, and another separate section.

People didn't quite know what to make of it.

[narrator] Above the living quarters on the ground level,

four more floors were added but never fully completed.

[Sunny] The second floor, which is right above that rounded roof,

is inside the house.

I think it was meant to be some kind of a master bedroom when it was finished.

When you get up to the third floor,

which has the second smallest staircase,

that was going to be all enclosed

with windows just like the bottom floor.

This big staircase takes you up to the fourth floor.

And from there, there's ladders

that take you up to the crow's nest.

[Rob] Out here in the Wild West of America,

one man going against the grain,

expressing himself in timber and clever engineering, it's great to see.

[Linda] I never would have thought it would look like this in a million years.

It's beautiful.

[narrator] Francis Lee was a maverick builder.

His design decisions were all off the cuff.

[Sunny] Back in the '70s, when he started building this house,

there weren't any rules that you really had to follow.

So he ended up just doing everything his own way.

Nothing is to code up here.

[narrator] But Sunny's father's own way proved

to be a dangerous way.

[narrator] The Smith Mansion was the lifework of Francis Lee Smith,

a talented carpenter and father to Sunny.

He was an unconventional builder

and almost always worked alone,

something he ended up paying the ultimate price for.

Unfortunately my dad never wore any kind of safety equipment.

On this northeast corner, he was building on a secondary roof system.

He was using a 12x4 piece of plywood to measure with, and it fell and made him slip.

He couldn't hang on and he fell.

And that's the end of it.

He laid there for two days before he was found.

[Rob] The phrase, "He died doing what he loved," is really quite apt here.

He loved building that house.

[narrator] Despite never being completed,

the fact the mansion is still standing proud comes as no surprise to Sunny.

I know how this place was constructed,

and I know it's going to be here for another hundred years.

It might be broken down, pieces might be falling off, but it'll be here.

Oh, yeah.

[narrator] For Sunny, this will always be a monument to her father.

[Sunny] This house is my dad, in every sense of the word.

It's crazy, bold. It's beautiful.

[narrator] For others, it echoes the attitude

of the country's early settlers.

[Linda] I think it's a masterpiece.

I think this house represents true, old West grit and spirit.

[narrator] A dilapidated building on a quiet stretch

of Route 66 hides an incredible story of compassion,

during one of America's most troubling times.

[Philip] Route 66 really is a piece of Americana.

It has so many aspects to it, and a lot of it we really don't know.

And this abandoned property fulfils a piece of that story.

[Jim] It's got a pole in front that looks like

it might have once held up a big sign.

But the sign is gone. The building is boarded up.

[narrator] This was once a life-saving stop along America's Mother Road.

For some travelers, this place was an important refuge.

It was a place of safety in a world that could be

particularly hostile and dangerous.

[Ed] The tension came from the outside world, okay?

From having to interact with people who didn't care about me.

But when I was here, I was very well-protected.

[Kenya] This is one of the sad and dark chapters in American history

that we so often ignore because it goes against the ideals of our nation.

[narrator] But amongst the horrors,

there is a heartening tale of a family that went above and beyond.

We need to make sure that we educate the future generations

about this wonderful family,

fulfilling a need as a safe haven during a difficult time in history.

[narrator] The buildings here have sat derelict for decades.

But Reverend Allen Threatt remembers a far busier time.

When I was a kid, I remember it.

I was about seven or eight years old, coming out here to gas...

the gas pump was right here, put gas into the cars.

[narrator] The gas station was opened by Reverend Allen's grandfather,

who made sure his business reflected his personal values.

We would always try to take care of the customer,

try to make people happy because this was a service station of love.

[narrator] The Threatt story of hospitality began in 1921,

during one of America's most disturbing events.

In the woods nearby,

you can see the remains of a house that's now kind of collapsed.

But once upon a time, this was an important place.

This is the home that my grandfather built to raise his family in.

[narrator] Ed Threatt and Reverend Allen are cousins

and have heard tales of how this house became

a refuge for people desperately fleeing the nearby city of Tulsa.

[Ed] What happened in Tulsa should never happen to anybody.

You know, it just shouldn't happen.

But my grandpa, being the kind of man that he was, just opened up,

opened his heart and let people come to stay here.

[narrator] The event that people were escaping from was the Tulsa race massacre.

An African-American young man is accused of speaking

inappropriately to a white woman.

And ultimately, those accusations will lead

to a raid of a white mob upon the thriving

and successful black community of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

[Jim] It was absolutely devastating.

In the end, something like 35 square blocks

of the city were burned to the ground.

The initial estimates were that about 36 people were killed in the riots,

but later it emerged that the number

might have been as high as 300.

[Ed] These are stories that I've heard, where our property,

people were able to come and stay here and rest

until they were able to find additional means to take care of themselves.

[narrator] Later in the decade,

a key moment in American history

would turn the Threatt family property into the only one of its kind.

[narrator] The Threatt Filling Station,

situated on the edge of Oklahoma City,

was a welcome stop for motorists

during a time when automobile travel was booming.

But driving meant different things to different people.

Traveling during the Jim Crow era for a black person

was filled with all kinds of dangers,

from entering a building, from needing to get gas,

more importantly, trying to go to the bathroom.

[narrator] Reverend Allen and Ed's grandfather

recognized this sad state of affairs and opened

the Threatt Filling Station in 1922.

When the road here became part of Route 66, five years later,

it was said to be the only black-owned service station

on the whole 2,448-mile highway.

This black-owned filling station was critical

to the success of African-Americans

that travelled along the Mother Road.

Imagine not being able to get gas at a white station,

but if you came to this filling station, you were home.

You could get gas and then keep on motoring along.

[narrator] As word spread of this unique gas station,

people began stopping here for more than just gas.

There was a table here.

People could sit around the table.

Generally, they were playing dominoes or cards or something of that nature.

And here, there were booths and stuff like that.

And this area over here, well,

you can see where food will be passed through

from the kitchen to different customers.

[narrator] At weekends in the summer,

it was in the field behind the gas station where eyes were drawn.

This side of the station, they had what's called the Negro Baseball League,

where cars lined up all the way down the road about two or three miles.

The backstop was here, first, second, third base.

We had bleachers along the side here.

People came here to relax and enjoy themselves.

[narrator] But this service station wasn't just

a welcome stop for black motorists

but a potentially life-saving one, too.

Just a bit down the road was the town of Luther, which was a sundown town.

There were literally signs that would say,

"Black people had to be out of town by sundown or else..."

And at a time when lynching was still prevalent

in this country, the "or else" was serious.

That was a real threat.

[narrator] Next door to the gas station,

the Threatts offered an alternative night time experience.

[Jim] The Threatt Enterprise became a gathering place for people in the community.

They could come out on the weekends for barbecue and dances.

[Ed] There was a jukebox in the corner up there.

There was always music being played.

Pretty much the floor in the middle was a dance floor.

[narrator] The bar was called the Brown Bomber and was run by Ed's father.

[Ed] I enjoyed every second that I was in this place.

My brother and I, um, every Friday and Saturday,

we would barbecue ribs.

That was sort of like our job.

[narrator] The Threatt family had built something centered around community,

an approach that continued as the service station

passed down through the family.

In 1950, Uncle Ulysses and Auntie Elizabeth took over and lived upstairs.

But Elizabeth would soon have to run things singlehandedly.

Uncle Ulysses, he passed away in December 1956.

She never came back up here again.

That's when she had her bedroom downstairs.

She ran the business. She kept it up and going.

She did all of that while she was still a schoolteacher.

[narrator] At the end of the '50s,

traffic began to be diverted away from historic Route 66

to the new interstate highway.

Dwindling customers and Elizabeth's old age finally took their toll.

And the service station shut for good in 1974.

[narrator] The Threatt Filling Station was a vital sanctuary

to African Americans throughout the middle of the 20th century,

as the road to racial equality progressed painfully slow.

And that journey is still ongoing.

[Ed] Ten years ago, I was the Mayor of Luther and I had a citizen tell me,

"Don't let dark catch you in town."

So you would like to think that things have changed.

They haven't changed that much.

They haven't.

[Philip] We definitely are not at the finish line yet.

There's definitely some good distance to travel.

And if I could travel, I would travel

with Threatt Family Filling Station folk,

because historically that family has embodied

the right spirit that we need to move forward.

[narrator] In Florida's so-called Magic City

is a venue that helped announce its arrival

as one of the country's newest vacation hotspots.

[Kyle] We are in South Florida at the mouth of Miami River,

and there's no more beautiful location.

[Sascha] Miami Beach is famous.

Everything is about water, the sea, and the sundown here.

[narrator] Right under the nose of Miami's residents

lies a long-forgotten structure.

This is definitely a piece of statement architecture.

It has a really strong, distinctive silhouette.

[Kyle] There are a lot of seats,

and it just opens out into water.

So you gotta think, "This is a place where sports are happening on the water."

[narrator] Ultimately, this place would prove

to be more than a water sports venue.

Events you would not expect took place here.

[narrator] The biggest surprise, though,

would arrive 20 years after a disaster shut it down.

The assumption was that, "Oh, my God, she's gone."

She wasn't gone.

Strong lady. Strong lady.

[narrator] In the early '60s,

the city of Miami wanted to show the world it was on the rise.

They invested in large malls, a new football team.

And here on this small downtown island, the Miami Marine Stadium.

Miami Marine Stadium was the first purpose-built

powerboat stadium ever built in the United States.

[narrator] Commissioned in 1962,

the stadium played a key part in giving Miami its iconic image.

Longtime Miami resident, Bill Talbert,

spent many afternoons here watching the action unfold.

[Bill] I can remember sitting in those stands.

The powerboats were just so incredibly exciting.

There's 6,566 seats here, and there's not a bad seat.

[narrator] The task to design this stadium was handed

to a 28-year-old immigrant from Cuba called Hilario Candela.

One of his first decisions was to pick a building material

tough enough to withstand the salty sea air.

This stadium is still considered a modernist icon

'cause it's made entirely from poured concrete.

And at the time, it was the largest structure

of cantilevered concrete in the world.

[narrator] But construction of the stadium was not the only challenge.

A track for the boats to race on was also needed.

[Kenya] They created a U-shaped basin that allowed boats

to turn 180 degrees at high speeds.

Some boats could go as fast as 100 miles an hour.

[Sascha] The dredging of this basin alone

cost the same amount as building the entire stadium.

[narrator] After more than a year in the making,

on December 27, 1963, the stadium officially opened.

But opening day would end in tragedy.

[narrator] The Miami Marine Stadium was the nation's

first purpose-built powerboat arena, and it put Miami on the map.

When this was opened in '63, this was a sleepy little southern town.

This was a bold statement to the world.

On the water, on the Atlantic Ocean,

in this emerging town called Miami

that, you know, we're a big-time town.

[narrator] Spectators were fully immersed

in the atmosphere, thanks to the stadium's design.

With this closed-in roof, the sound went up, around, and down.

It was loud, loud, loud and exciting.

It got you out of your seats.

[narrator] But on the very first day,

a tragic turn of events risked the future of the venue before it had even begun.

Unfortunately, on the opening day, one of the racers,

James Tapp, lost his life in a crash.

[narrator] In a practice run, one of Tapp's engines stalled,

flipping the boat over and proving fatal for the driver.

It was a painful reminder of how dangerous the sport can be.

Despite the tragedy, the stadium continued to be a success.

People were thrilled by high-speed boat races.

[narrator] Over the next decade, Miami boomed.

Tourists flooded to the city, with the stadium playing its part.

[Kenya] Miami was the center of boat racing

in the United States and hosted many different types of it.

[narrator] But the stadium wasn't just about racing.

Miami Marine Stadium hosted pageants, concerts, bands, religious events.

If you have like a football stadium or a tennis stadium,

the field is the stage there.

But here there is no field. The field is the water.

So stages were brought in.

[narrator] Bill was one of the many fans lucky enough

to enjoy some of the memorable concerts held here.

It's one of the unique things you can do is see a concert on your boat.

Getting here at noon and tying up boats four or five across.

You know, I remember cooking lobsters

and people were swimming in the water.

Man, was that fun.

[narrator] In 1972, a different kind of event drew eyes from across

the whole country to the stadium.

Richard Nixon was on the campaign trail for reelection as president.

President Richard Nixon held his youth rally at this stadium.

The rally filled with Nixon supporters

as they chanted, "Four more years."

[narrator] The stadium was a symbol of Miami's growth as a city,

but it became a victim of its own success.

As powerboat engines became bigger and stronger,

powerboat racing moved into the wide open sea.

[narrator] Mother Nature, though,

would deal the final blow to the stadium.

[Bill] Hurricane Andrew was August 24th, 1992.

Remember, you would always talk about the big one,

on that Saturday, it was coming straight in.

I said, "This is the big one."

It's scary and you don't know where it's going to hit.

Miami avoided a direct hit,

but it was suspected that the stadium sustained some damage

during the event, and it was declared unsafe for the public.

[narrator] Post-hurricane,

the city had other priorities and the stadium fell into disrepair.

But the original damage assessment didn't sit right with some.

The assumption was for years that it's...

it's structurally unsound, and somebody,

maybe the original architect said, "How does anybody know that?"

[narrator] Incredibly, after 20 years of closure,

the original assessment was proven wrong.

The study was done, and it's fairly structurally sound,

and that's what saved her.

And in 2018, this was put on the National Register of Historic Places.

It can never be torn down.

And you can see, look at this.

It looks like it'll last for a hundred years.

[narrator] A restoration effort is now underway,

and there is hope these seats will one day be full again.

[narrator] The Miami Marine Stadium symbolizes

a time when the city announced itself

as an entertainment destination

to be reckoned with.

[Bill] It's part of our history. It's unique.

It distinguishes Miami from all the competition.

Nobody has this.