Watts Towers: The Man Who Built Something Big

In nineteen twenty-one, a tile setter named Sabato Rodia began digging post holes in the backyard of his house at seventeen sixty-five East One Hundred Seventh Street in Watts. He was about forty years old. He had been born in a small hill town near Naples called Ribottoli, come to the United States as a child, worked across California in the building trades, and had at some point formed a plan he later described in the simplest possible terms. He said he had it in his mind to do something big.

He worked alone. For thirty-three years. Without scaffolding, without machinery, without welding, without bolts. He used steel mesh and mortar as the structural base, and into the mortar he pressed everything he could find: broken tile, fragments of pottery, sea shells, glass from green and brown bottles, the bases of seven-Up bottles, which had a particular green Rodia favored. He worked inward and upward, building seventeen interconnected spires around a central ship form. The tallest spire reaches ninety-nine and a half feet. The entire structure is encrusted with pattern.

In nineteen fifty-five, Rodia signed his property over to a neighbor and moved north to Martinez, California. He never returned to Watts. He gave no explanation. He almost never spoke about what he had built.

The year after he left, the City of Los Angeles condemned the Towers and ordered them demolished on the grounds that they were unsafe structures. The neighbors who had inherited the property organized. A group called the Committee for Simon Rodia's Towers in Watts arranged an engineering stress test: they attached a horizontal tensile load to the tallest spire and pulled. The Towers held. The city backed down.

Rodia died in nineteen sixty-five, the same summer as the Watts Rebellion, never having seen the Towers saved, never having returned. He was living quietly in Martinez. Whether he followed the news from Los Angeles is not known.

The Towers became a National Historic Landmark in nineteen ninety, thirty-four years after the city tried to tear them down. They are still there. Rodia's name is on a plaque now.