The Wonder of the Watts Towers
It
must have been a strange sight for the children of the Watts
section of Los Angeles, California. Their neighbor was building
towers in his yard.
They could see him every day after he returned from work—a small man, strapped into a window-washer’s harness, hoisting himself up the metal bars.
Some of the children were his friends, and they brought him soda bottles and old dinner plates to decorate his towers. Who could have guessed that the towers would become a cultural treasure for all to enjoy?
Seen
today from far away, they look like radio towers from another
planet. Get closer and you’ll notice their bits of
mirror and tile glinting in the sun. Step through the mosaic
wall that surrounds them and you’ll enter the world
of the Watts Towers.
Above you, the curving, connecting bars of the towers reach a point nearly one hundred feet high. Around you, pink pathways lead to a gazebo, birdbaths, fountains, a barbecue, and even a cement boat. Every surface is covered with cement and color. Thousands of seashells, tiles, bottles, mirrors, and pieces of pottery are stuck into the cement in swirling patterns. It’s enough to make you dizzy with wonder.
All
of this is the creation of construction worker Simon Rodia.
“I had in my mind to do something big, and I did,”
Mr. Rodia once said. It’s our only clue to why he spent
more than thirty years building these fantastic structures.
Simon was born in Ribottoli, Italy, in 1879. He came to the United States in the 1890s and settled in Pennsylvania to work in the coal mines. Simon worked in stone quarries, on railroads, and in construction before moving to California. Eventually he bought the wedge-shaped piece of land in Watts where he built his home and his towers.
Mr. Rodia worked alone on the towers in his spare time. He used no formal plans or modern machinery, just the simple tools of his trade.
The
towers grew gradually as he experimented with ways to make
them strong. He built the towers by bending metal bars,
overlapping them, and wrapping them with wire before coating
them with cement.
Mr. Rodia called his cement garden “Nuestro Pueblo” (Our Town). He stamped his initials and the shape of his tools into its walls and archways. To add to his decorations, he combed the neighborhood, collecting things people had thrown away.
The towers are noticeably like the thin wooden towers that are carried in an Italian religious procession. Perhaps Mr. Rodia was trying to recreate something that he remembered fondly from his homeland.
Mr.
Rodia left Los Angeles in 1955. City officials called for
the towers to be destroyed, fearing they were unsafe. But
a group of people calling themselves the Committee for Simon
Rodia’s Towers in Watts were determined to save them.
The group admired the towers as a feat of engineering and
as a work of artistic imagination.
The towers passed safety tests. Eventually they were recognized as a historic monument by the national, state, and city governments. The Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department is in charge of restoring the towers and keeping them in good condition.
The
towers have lasted through many changes in the surrounding
neighborhood. When Mr. Rodia began his project, Watts was
a semirural area on the edge of the city. Over the years
it has become an official part of Los Angeles and home to
thousands of African Americans. During the summer of 1965,
some young black people—upset about unfair treatment
by police—began to revolt in protest. Much of the area
was burned.
As
part of efforts to rebuild the area, the city government
set up a community arts center and an annual music festival
in the shadow of the towers. The towers remain a symbol
of hope in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
Art critics have called the Watts Towers “a monument to the human spirit.” Simon Rodia had a vision of what he wanted to do, and he did it with little more than hand tools, cast-off materials, and his inventiveness. He was never trained in an art school, but he created a work of art that appeals to people and gives them joy.
