Watts towers did not begin with a tower at all. It began with a ship, or an utterly immobile rendition of one. Three thousand miles from the ocean that carried him to the United States from Italy 26 years before, Simon Rodia dug a boat-shaped trench at the narrow tip of his triangular lot, filled it with concrete and anchored into it scavenged lengths of steel. He constructed a knee-high, green-tinted concrete deck, which he decorated with salvaged tiles in sky blues, ocean greens, and sunset yellows, oranges and pinks. He wrapped the exposed steel rods in chicken wire and coated them with cement mortar. He embellished the tallest one--the foremast--with a series of delicate openwork ovoids. The aft mast became a succession of bowl shapes covered with white seashells.
Towers of Power
Simon Rodia's masterwork is inseparable from its site on a dead-end street in Watts. Which is another good reason to stop ignoring it.
With that, Rodia embarked on a 34-year voyage of sculptural whimsy around his tenth-of-an-acre backyard. Those who study the Watts Towers say he had no formal plan. Yet in that first sculpture--later christened the Ship of Marco Polo--lies the template for the entire work: the spires, the tiles, the juxtaposition of concrete with capriccio. Indeed, some students of the towers say Rodia conceived of the site itself as a seafaring vessel, setting what looks like a captain's wheel into the base of the eastern tower, just behind the Ship of Marco Polo.
Rodia's tools were crude: a pipe-fitter's wrench, a chisel, a mixing pail. He worked without machine tools or drills, without scaffolding or bolts. It was an obsession that consumed him through six presidents, two earthquakes and a world war, until he had single-handedly constructed, in addition to the ship, three tall towers, a gazebo, a fountain, a fish pond, two enclosure walls and various other things--17 sculptures in all. The tallest tower rises more than 10 stories above the flat Central Los Angeles landscape. The entire agglomeration, considered as a single work, is said to be the largest structure ever made by one man alone--a vertical triumph in a horizontal town.
In 1955, Rodia handed the deed to the property to a neighbor and walked away. He left it to us to figure out what to do with what he had made. Fifty years later, we're still scratching our heads.
