Watts Towers
Interesting facts
- A photograph of Simon Rodia appears among the crowd of faces on the cover of the Beatles' 1967 album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
- The blue glass set into the towers is thought to come largely from old milk of magnesia bottles.
- Besides scavenged shards, Rodia used seconds and damaged pieces from two local tile makers, Malibu Potteries and the California Clay Products Company.
- In 1959 actor Nicholas King and film editor William Cartwright bought the abandoned site from Rodia's neighbour for $2,000 to save it from demolition.
- The towers rode out the 1994 Northridge earthquake almost unscathed, losing only a few loose fragments.
- A 1957 short documentary, The Towers, preserved recordings of Rodia's voice and footage of him at work, though it misspelled his name as Rodilla.
- Jazz bassist Charles Mingus, who grew up in Watts, described his childhood fascination with Rodia and the towers in his 1971 autobiography Beneath the Underdog.
- The Los Angeles County Museum of Art staged the first museum exhibition about the towers in 1962, a show of photographs.
- Harlan Ellison's story With Virgil Oddum at the East Pole, inspired by the towers and dedicated to Rodia, won the 1986 Locus Award for best short story.
- Beside the towers runs the Watts Towers Crescent Greenway, a 0.2-mile path billed as the shortest open rail-trail in the United States.
Why it is worth it
Seventeen spires of steel and mortar rise over a small corner lot in Watts, their lacy ribs glittering with fragments of green soda bottles, blue glass, seashells, broken plates and tiles. The tallest reaches about 30 metres (99.5 feet). Everything on the site, from the towers to the walls, the pavement and the smaller sculptures, was made by one man: Sabato Rodia, an Italian-born tile setter and construction labourer known as Sam or Simon, who worked on it alone from 1921 to 1954. He called it Nuestro Pueblo, Spanish for "our town".
Rodia came to the United States as a teenager in the 1890s and drifted through Pennsylvania, Seattle, Oakland and Long Beach before settling in Watts, in south Los Angeles, in 1920. He had no plans and no scaffolding. He bent scrap reinforcing bar into frames, apparently using the tracks of the nearby Pacific Electric line as a vise, wrapped them in wire mesh, coated them in a cement of his own mixing and pressed in whatever he could find. Neighbourhood children brought him shards of pottery, and he walked the railway right-of-way as far as Wilmington, some 30 km away, collecting material. Some of the glass still shows the logos of 7 Up and Canada Dry. Scholars have pointed out how closely the towers resemble the gigli, the tall decorated towers carried through the streets of Nola, in his native Campania, during the festival of St Paulinus.
In 1955, after a stroke and a fall, Rodia gave the property to a neighbour and left for northern California, where he died ten years later. When his bungalow burned and the city ordered the towers demolished as unsafe, two new owners and a citizens' committee demanded a test instead. An engineering test on 10 October 1959 showed that the structures could withstand a lateral force of 10,000 pounds, and they were spared. Today the site is a National Historic Landmark and a state historic park, one of the best-known works of outsider art anywhere.
Getting there
The towers stand on East 107th Street in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles, about 2.7 km from Willowbrook. The 103rd Street/Watts Towers station of the Metro A Line is a short walk away. The nearest airport is Hawthorne Municipal (HHR), about 9 km away; Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) lies about 16 km to the west.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Walt Disney Concert Hall 13.0 km · theatre-building
- Griffith Observatory 20.7 km · observatory
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Watts Towers, Towers of Simon Rodia, or Nuestro Pueblo are a collection of 17 interconnected sculptural towers, architectural structures, and individual sculptural features and mosaics within the site of the artist's original residential property in Watts, Los Angeles, California, United States. The entire site of towers, structures, sculptures, pavement, and walls were designed and built solely by Sabato Rodia, an Italian immigrant construction worker and tile mason, over a period of 33 years from 1921 to 1954. The tallest of the towers is 99.5 feet (30.3 m). The work is an example of outsider art and Italian-American naïve art.
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