One of the world’s great works of folk art, the Watts Towers offer a glittering testament to the imagination and tenacity of Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, the man that created it by himself over 33 years.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 13, 1977; designated a National Historic Landmark on December 14, 1990

It’s impossible to take a bad photo of the Watts Towers. Or at least, if you do take one, it’s totally your fault. They’re just too picturesque. The Towers’ bulging spires pierce the sky, the biggest ones standing nearly 100 feet tall, glittering sentinels guarding the low-rise town of Watts. On a clear day like the one I visited, they look like scaffolding for a cosmic artist trying to paint the sky. 

That artist was Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who came to the US when he was a boy. He moved from Pennsylvania to Seattle to Oakland, where he had three kids with his wife Lucia. When they got divorced, he left the family behind and moved to Southern California, eventually buying a triangular plot of land in Watts in 1920. He liked the dusty lot because it was right near the Pacific Electric “red car” line; the Watts Station was just up the street. 

The following year, with no plan other than making “something big,” he began to create the work that would occupy over three decades of his life, and become perhaps the most famous work of folk art in America, maybe the world. Hell, Rodia’s right next to Bob Dylan on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Rodia’s first move was to layer his backyard in patches of brown, red and green cement. He pressed all sorts of objects into the cement as it was drying – baskets, bits of scrap metal, pieces of ceramic tile and cracked records, broken bottles and old furniture. Anything he could find lying around, or trade the neighborhood kids in exchange for fresh fruit and spare change. 

Next came a “garden” made of concrete cacti, then a gazebo formed of bent steel rods, chicken wire and cement laden with mosaics of found objects. He built loveseats, fountains, a labyrinth, a bird bath, a sculpture of Marco Polo’s ship…and later on the towers themselves, three mammoth ones and five shorter ones, built out of scrap rebar and supported by pipe and iron buttresses, sheathed in glass and seashells and mirror shards and all manner of detritus he found. He wrapped the whole shebang with a seven-foot scalloped wall, festooned in colorful rock, tile and soda bottle pieces (7-Up was his favorite). There are hearts all over. Above one of the doorways leading into the towers, Rodia carved his initials and the phrase “nuestro pueblo,” or “our town,” his name for his creation. 

For 33 years, Rodia worked on the Watts Towers on nights, weekends and holidays. He bent every piece of rebar himself, using the train tracks as a vise; set every piece of tile by himself. And he might have continued were it not for a stroke he suffered in 1954, and a fall from one of the towers not long after. He was 75 years old at the time, and decided his work was done. In 1955 he gave his property to a neighbor and moved north to spend the rest of his days with his sister in Martinez, CA.  

Rodia had professional experience as a cement pourer and a tile setter, and also had experience climbing tall structures with a safety belt from his days as a lineman for the phone company. All that certainly helped as he scaled the rungs of his nearly 100-foot towers, a bucket of wet cement in one hand, a bucket of seashells in the other. 

But he had no formal experience as an artist, nor are there any records of Rodia creating other works of art during his lifetime. That’s the big mystery for me in the story of the Watts Towers. How does a semi-literate man with no artistic background develop the urge to embark on a creative mission with virtually no precedent, and sustain it for 33 years with no help? 

And where did his inspiration come from? In Nola, Italy (very close to Rodia’s hometown of Ribottoli) there is an Italian feast day called “The Feast of the Gigli,” during which locals parade around giant wood and papier-mache pillars, each a “giglio…” some surmise that those inspired the Towers. You can find echoes of California mission architecture…bits of Catholic church gaudiness in the ornamentation…you might see ribs and masts used in shipbuilding, tangled into Rodia’s work. Some have compared the playfulness of the shapes and decorations to the work of Antoni Gaudí. The NRHP nomination form suggests a connection between the Towers and the oil derricks that once dotted the outskirts of LA. Sure, I can see all of that. But mostly I see the unique vision of one guy, willing to see art in trash, and committed to turning the things that nobody sees into something that you can’t not see. 

The Watts Towers were never permitted, and after a fire burned down Rodia’s old bungalow on the property in 1956, the City of LA declared the whole shebang a safety hazard and ordered the Towers torn down. A band of concerned citizens formed the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts, and one of its founders, an aeronautics engineer named Bud Goldstone, convinced the City to examine the Towers’ structural soundness with a test of his devising. Steel cables were attached to the towers, and pulled laterally with a crane, exerting 10,000 pounds of force. The Towers didn’t budge, but the crane experienced mechanical failure. LA’s Building and Safety Department backed off. Goldstone got to keep the “to be demolished” sign as a souvenir. No surprise there….The Watts Towers survived the 1933 Long Beach and 1994 Northridge earthquakes with just a few bits of decoration shaken loose…and they survived the 1965 Watts Riots unscathed, too. They weren’t going anywhere.

For 16 years the Committee for Simon Rodia’s Towers in Watts were stewards of the Towers; in 1975 they teamed up with the City of LA, then with the State of California in 1978. They’re now managed by the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department. Right next door is the Watts Towers Arts Center/Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center, which has guarded the Watts Towers since the early 1960s. They give guided tours, and work with artists to surround the site with contemporary art inspired by Rodia and his vision. They also produce two annual music festivals onsite. 

Currently visitors are only allowed to walk around the perimeter of the Watts Towers, until LACMA completes a multi-year preservation effort. But even walking down E. 107th St. in its shadow is an experience unlike anything else. The proportions, the colors, the tiny little details in the mosaics…they’re all perceivable from the street, from the other side of the fence. You can imagine what it would have been like to live next to it while Rodia was building it, and to see these massive structures come into focus over a period of 33 years. 

In Charles Mingus’s autobiography Beneath the Underdog, there’s a fascinating excerpt about a young Charles watching Rodia build the Towers as he waited for his classmate across the street. You get a real sense of Rodia’s non-linear process – how he would build, tear down and rebuild ’til his work matched his vision. What a privilege to be a young creative kid, watching this feat of imagination and passion come into being, right before your eyes. What an inspiration it must have been to witness the abundant fruits of Rodia’s labor. And it still is, over a century later.

Recommended Reading

+Watts Towers’ NRHP nomination form

+Watts Towers Arts Center history (wattstowers.org)

+Watts Towers: The Story of an LA Icon (Discover Los Angeles, 2019)

+RIP Bud Goldstone, the Hero Who Saved Watts Towers (KCET, 2012)

+Artscapes: Uncovering the rich past of the Watts Towers and its architect (Daily Bruin, 2012)

+The Feast History (OLMCFeast.com)