Nitt Witt Ridge: One Man's Argument With Waste
Near Morro Bay, California
Art Beal was Cambria's garbage collector, and he was also, over the course of several decades beginning in nineteen twenty-eight, one of its most devoted builders. He bought a hillside lot and started constructing a house from the material he collected on his rounds: abalone shells, car parts, beer cans, driftwood, broken toilets, hubcaps, fragments of concrete. He used a pick and shovel. He paid for cement when he needed it and almost nothing else. The ocean and the hillsides and the town dump supplied the rest.
What grew over the years was not a house in any conventional sense. It was nine levels of terraced structure, stone and concrete and scavenged wood, part cave and part tower, part garden and part ruin, all of it threaded together by one man's eye for what belonged next to what. He called it Nitt Witt Ridge. The county eventually had him briefly declared mentally incompetent. The state of California later decided his work was worth preserving and designated it California Historical Landmark number nine hundred thirty-nine in nineteen eighty-six, formally recognizing it as a twentieth-century folk art environment.
Beal died in nineteen ninety-two, having spent most of his adult life on the project. The ridge is still there, tours by appointment, a monument to the proposition that what other people discard is, in the right hands, a perfectly adequate building material.
