Story & Photos by Alisha Jucevic
“[This is] the greatest backyard art project of anybody, anytime,” says the tour guide as I walk beneath the spindly spires of the Watts Towers. Standing almost one hundred feet tall, the towers are a National Historic Landmark and California Historic Monument. They rise from a triangular wedge shaped lot in the center of Watts, Los Angeles, an area known for a 1965 riot that left thirty-four dead and over a thousand injured. Despite this violent history, however, Watts’ most famous landmark provides a captivating and inspiring piece of artwork.
Sabato “Simon” Rodia started his work on the art project in 1921 and spent the following thirty-four years building them after his day job as a construction worker. And he did it all alone.
“We’ve had a lot people come forth and say, ‘We gave him those plates and we gave him those shelves,’ but we’ve had no one come forth and say, ‘We helped him build it,’” the tour guide, James Janisse, continues.
Rodia’s brilliant sculpture is covered in various colors and shapes. He used cookie cutters and iron rods to draw hearts into the mixture of concrete, sand, and cement that cover the steal girders, pipes, and rebar that make the towers’ frame. Seashells, cracked plates, shattered bottles, broken tiles, and pebbles embellish the surface.
Also carved into the structure are small flower shapes, originally made from the imprints of water faucet handles. Rodia even crafted a set of doors out of old box spring mattresses covered with sand, cement, and concrete. Basically, whatever was available and could attract the passerbyer’s eye, Rodia used somewhere. People suspect he purposefully built the towers close to a train track for the guaranteed audience riding by multiple times a day.
“Above all else this was a labor of love,” Janisse says. “You can call it an eccentricity or an obsession. You can call it all those different things but above all else it was a labor of love.”
When he finished the project in 1955, Rodia gave the deed to his neighbor and moved to Martinez, California. The towers are now owned by the city of Los Angeles and are managed by the Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs Department.
This past February, the site received a $500,000 grant from the James Irvine Foundation to help finance an evaluation of damage to the towers; however, the actual cost of repairing the damages is estimated to be much larger than the awarded grant.
The Watts Towers are open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 4 p.m. Tours are conducted every half-an-hour. General admission is $7.00 with reduced rates for seniors and young adults.
 
 
 

Gallery • 2 Photos

7. These large doors entering the structure are guessed to be garage doors. They are made from old box spring mattresses covered with sand cement and concrete.