Watts is not Montreal. The latter is where I thought I would be about now, squeezing a week of Euro-esque travel out of my handful of vacation days and Euro-unfriendly budget. Those plans, however, were derailed by the onset of an acute bout of joblessness. And so my unplanned summer stay-cation began with a midday trip down the Harbor Freeway.
An Angeleno who has never toured Watts Towers is the urban equivalent of a New Yorker who has never bothered with the Statue of Liberty. You think it will always be there, that you'll get to it someday, maybe when you have out-of-town visitors. And then 14 years later, you find yourself staring at a job posting in Ohio or Oregon and realize you might leave L.A. without having made the trip.
On a smoggy Friday, I exited at Century Boulevard prepared to be underwhelmed. The website said the towers were "scaffolded." When I called, I was warned that I could see them only "through the fence." Tours had been restricted since May 2008, when FEMA coughed up $569,000 to repair damage from torrential winter rains three years previous. The scheduled March 2009 re-opening had been delayed to at least late September; three workmen had been laid off because of the city's budget crisis.
Still, there were plenty of undeterred visitors. I joined half a dozen in the adjacent Watts Towers Arts Center for the 12-minute documentary, "The Towers." The 1957 film -- made before Watts Towers was laden with cultural and political symbolism -- has an odd, noir feel. A narrator's gravelly voice sets the scene over an eerie "Twilight Zone"-ish flute: "The little city of Watts clings to the outer edge of the city of Los Angeles, a scattered collection of shacks, trailers and weather-beaten bungalows. Flat and impoverished, it is the last place on Earth to look for the extraordinary."
More stucco, fewer trailers, but otherwise the assessment of Watts holds up. I stepped outside with a guide to see what I could. As it turned out, the scaffolding was gone and plenty can be seen through the fence.
My guide laid out the story of Sabato ("Simon" or "Sam") Rodia, the 4-foot-11 immigrant from southern Italy who'd started out in Pennsylvania's coal mines before heading west. Multiple wives and many unaccounted for years later, he arrived in Southern California, bought a wedge of land right up against the Red Car tracks, and in 1921 began building a landmark during evenings and weekends. He was 42.
