The Watts Towers Restoration: An Extraordinary Monument to Human Creativity and Grit in South Central Los Angeles
Simon Rodia was driven by a voice few of us ever hear. In 1921, he bought a small house on a dead-end street in the Watts neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles. There was nothing especially remarkable about it, except that the lot was triangular and butted up next to a loud and dusty set of railroad tracks. Simon Rodia, however, sensed its potential.
Rodia had emigrated to the United States from Italy more than 25 years before. He was in his early 40’s when he moved to Watts, and he made his living as a construction worker and tile setter. Like his home, nothing seemed remarkable about Simon either, but looks can be deceiving.
This “common” man did an incredibly uncommon thing: he built the largest single construction ever completed by a lone human being (1). That structure, which we now know as the Watts Towers (Simon always referred to it as Nuestro Pueblo or “Our Town” in Spanish), is, in my opinion, the most remarkable piece of folk art ever created.
If you’ve visited the Grand Canyon or other massive natural wonders, you know that pictures never seem to do them justice. Something similar happens with Watts Towers. The scale is hard to believe without seeing it: 17 different steel reinforced concrete stucco sculptures, including three main towers, two of which soar nearly 100 feet into the air. The highest tower just so happens to contain the longest concrete reinforced column on the planet. (2)
It’s the wildest looking thing, too. It’s absolutely a piece of art, but it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before or since. Decorated with all sorts of different colored, different sized seashells, broken household pottery--like plates, saucers, and cups--as well as bits of tile and bottle glass (his favorite was green 7-Up bottles). There are plenty of Easter eggs to find too, small concrete sculptures integrated into the larger whole. In terms of the design, he made it up as he went along, not bothering with blueprints or detailed drawings.
“I had it in my mind to build something big, and I did.”
He built it by hand, little by little, in his spare time, using only simple tools, ingenuity and his bare hands. He didn’t need scaffolding because the structures themselves were the scaffold. I can’t begin to guess how many thousands of times he must have climbed up the three towers, hauling a piece of rebar or a bucket of concrete and a trowel. According to art historians, all he ever used for safety equipment was a window washer’s belt.
Every day for 34 years—in the hours after work, over weekends, and on holidays, in good weather and bad—Simon added to his vision. There are thousands and thousands of linear feet of rebar, all bent by hand using only the railroad tracks as a vise. (3) There isn’t a single weld, bolt, or rivet in the entire thing. He’d use wire to attach one piece of rebar to the next, surround the rebar with wire mesh and then slather an inch or so of his own special mixture of concrete on it. Before it set, he’d decorate it with the found items and with thousands of hand drawn shapes.
Then one day in 1955, he decided he was done. He deeded the property and the sculptures to a neighbor and left town. Of course, his towers had become a landmark long before they were finished—a point of pride for a neighborhood that struggled economically and socially.
When the property changed hands, the local government wanted the towers torn down (he never bothered to ask for approval from the city—it was his back yard after all). But the people came together to oppose destroying the towers. Bud Goldstone, a local engineer, devised a stress test that showed Rodia’s towers were stronger than the cranes used to perform the stress test.
By the 1970s the Watts Towers had become a cultural heritage site, and later a hybrid state park—with the City of Los Angeles responsible for its maintenance. In the mid 80’s the city began conservation work, but the repairs failed almost as soon as they went up. That’s where I came in.
In the late 1980’s, not long after I’d returned from Holland, I got a call from the same Bud Goldstone, who stayed committed to preserving the towers over decades. He asked me to come out to Los Angeles and give him my analysis of the restoration efforts. The conservator he was working with knew me, my work in failure analysis and my background with Jahn. For some reason, Bud needed my report fast, and these were days before everyone had laptops, so I literally sat on his front porch and wrote the report (and a second copy for myself) longhand.
Suffice it to say I did not agree with several of the things the city was doing, especially the decision to patch broken sections using mortar alone, without preserving the decorations Rodia had used. But the problem they hired me to solve was making repairs that lasted. In a nutshell, they’d been using the wrong kind of mortar and applying it in the wrong way--not placing the joints properly to allow for the natural flexing and swaying of the structures. Water was getting in and rusting the iron, causing even more problems. With a switch to Jahn Masonry Repair Mortar and training on how best to use it, the city started truly protecting the monument and saving a good bit of time and money on rework in the process.
To this day I still get orders for the Watts Towers from time to time, and I’m happy to report that more recent conservation efforts seem to be on the right track artistically as well. It would be a shame to let that extraordinary monument to the common man’s creativity, innovation, and persistence waste away.
Someone asked Simon Rodia why he’d spent his life that way. He answered: “I had it in my mind to build something big, and I did.”
Dennis Rude
Stonecutter & President, Cathedral Stone Products
“Sabato Rodia was born in Serino, Italy (AV) in 1879 and arrived in the United States around 1894. He came to Watts in 1921 at age 42 and was commonly known as "Sam". The Watts Towers of Simon Rodia, his masterpiece and the world’s largest single construction created by one individual, was his obsession for 33 years. He called it “Nuestro Pueblo” or “Our Town”. It is located in the community of Watts in South Central Los Angeles, California.” Source: https://www.wattstowers.org/about-us
“The west tower, begun in 1921, contained the longest reinforced concrete columns in the world upon its completion, an important record in the history of architecture. The stability of the entire monument is ensured by its innovative architectural design embodying universal structural principles found in nature.” Source: California Dept of Parks and Rec, https://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=613
First heard this in the documentary “I build the tower,” then found on the Watts Towers Art Center Website and other sources: “The rear of the parcel of land, where Sam Rodia built Watts Towers in his spare time during the 33 years he lived in Watts, has always been an open space. When Rodia live there, the Pacific Electric Railway passed his house on its route between Watts and Wilmington. he would walk along the tracks looking for materials and use the rails as a tool under which he could bend his found rebar material.” : https://www.wattstowers.us/watts_towers_views/heights-watts-towers/watts-towers-04-back.htm
